Читать книгу Pilgrim Souls - Jan Murray - Страница 5

Fate slowly builds her mute countenance ...

and the soon-to-be lovers smile on each other ...

Rainer Maria Rilke

The Hunter Valley shiraz in its brown paper bag rolled around on the passenger side floor, the Byron Echosat on the seat beside me. Bob Dylan was filling the cabin with Girl from the North Country.

After dropping off my two young passengers I’d spent a lazy hour in the village, poking around. Now the setting sun was taking some of the heat out of the sweltering day and I was beginning to think about the night ahead, about sleeping on a stranger’s mattress on the floor with only the same stranger’s pink rug for cover. It was crazy! I should have booked in to a motel. But the agent had given me the keys and permission to move in. And in my present state of mind impatience went with the territory.

What did it matter that I’d be spending the night in a run-down hut, all on my own, in a lonely part of the dunes. In the dark. No electricity. No one knowing where I was. What was I thinking!

I passed the MITRE 10 hardware store on the corner of Jonson Street and turned into Browning. I was approaching the roundabout when I saw him.

Beware, beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Except for the black hair blowing around his face, the hitchhiker up ahead, trapped in the glow of a violent late-afternoon sunset, could have been mistaken for a civic monument, a piece of zany street art. My first thought: He looked handsome. My second: He looked dangerous. Even from this distance, the man’s aura troubled me, but what did I know about auras? One day, my first, in Byron Bay? Please.

Under the old linoleum I’d ripped up this morning in my frenzy I’d found sheets of yellowed newspaper. An article on hitchhiking had caught my eye. Seventy-five per cent of all rapes committed in the United States were as a result of hitchhiking, the article had screamed at its 1974 readers. The FBI had issued a poster, a warning guaranteed to scare the Bejeezus out of any woman considering hitching or giving a lift to a male hitchhiker. Is he a happy vacationer or an escaping criminal, a pleasant companion or a sex maniac, a friendly traveler or a vicious murderer? it had asked the American population of the day.

Not a soul back in Sydney knew of my whereabouts. The disconnectedness felt liberating but it posed challenges; self-preservation being one of them.

To pull up and invite the stranger into my car, or be just one more uncaring driver who speeds past and doesn’t give a damn? An ethical dilemma wrapped in a roundabout. What was my moral obligation to a stranger in need of a lift?

I checked the SUV cruising ahead of me. Hard not to be cynical. Its back windscreen was papered with stickers campaigning for love of trees and whales and urging the world to save the planet from pollution. Another faded 1991 bumper sticker screamed No Blood for Oil, reminding me of my own protest activity at the time of the Gulf War when my son, Jonathon, and I had taken part in an all-night sit-down in front of the US Embassy in Sydney.

I had also staged a second protest at the time when I refused to attend with my ministerial spouse, the official Prime Ministerial welcome to President George H. Bush at the National Maritime Museum where, on behalf of the American people, Bush was presenting the Museum with a fat cheque. The gas guzzler ahead of me pulled out and overtook the small green rust bucket in front. I watched this Master of the Universe head his mighty gas-guzzler towards the traffic circle and made a small bet with myself.

And I was on the money. No way did he stop for the hitchhiker. No sense of a moral obligation there.

The driver of the old green car in front, short of the roundabout, tooted a pedestrian, a girl with bum-length dreadlocks, wearing a long skirt, a quilted top and Jesus sandals. She ambled across the road to the driver, tossed an apologetic wave to me then stuck her head in the driver’s window. A good rainbow country citizen wouldn’t let herself get too upset about such a minor delay, I cautioned myself. This wasn’t Sydney. We didn’t sit on the horn in Byron Bay or rudely overtake just to make our point. Instead, I bade my time and spent it reflecting on how most of the streets in Byron Bay were named after literary legends. Jonson Street led into Browning, which converged with Tennyson at the roundabout where the hitchhiker stood with his thumb out.

Ruskin, Byron, Keats, Milton, Wordsworth and Shelley, I’d spotted them all during the day, and as well, my map showed a Marvell, Carlyle, Cowper, Burns, Kipling, and Scott. I’d even noted a tilt at the Aussies with Wright, Lawson, Kendall and Patterson Streets. The city fathers must have thought they could expunge the district’s savage history as a whaling station and abattoir with all their poesy. But one of my favourites, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, seemed to have missed out on his eponymous street. I thought of the books I’d purchased this morning at Ringo’s Café, a 1921 edition of Coleridge’s Literary Criticism.

No car had come up behind me. I was chilling, waiting for the two hippies in front to finish their conversation. Another friendly wave to me as the girl finished chatting and strolled back to the pavement. Now the little green car would stop for the hitchhiker, I figured, and I would be relieved of the duty to be kind and considerate to a stranger.

But I was wrong. The little green car took the first exit on the left out of the roundabout and headed up Tennyson, going in the opposite direction from the hitchhiker’s intention. That left yours truly as the next car into the circle.

I now entered the force field of the stranger. Weave a circle round him thrice.

The hitchhiker made eye contact with me. And close your eyes with holy dread. His look was an appeal to my humanity. A challenge. Compassion or disregard for a fellow traveler. I felt half annoyed that he could turn this chance meeting into a personal issue between the two of us, two people who were strangers to each other.

The Golf was almost stationary inside the circle and I could see he was no civic monument but a real life, flesh and blood virile male with a tanned and muscular body that showed up well against the stark white cargo shorts and the dark blue and white floral Hawaiian shirt. The boat shoes weren’t doing the casual chic look any harm either. And the hair I’d seen from way back blowing around his face was very straight, very black and very shiny.

I brought the Golf to a stop a short way past him and rolled down the window, watching in the side mirror as he picked up his bag and stood for a moment, looking around. Tall. Muscular. Broad shoulders. And, surprisingly, a Dr. Zhivago moustache. He began walking towards me. I spotted the gold earring. A gypsy!

When he came up to my window it was as if Omar Sharif himself was standing there, and how often had I’d drooled over Doctor Zhivago’s dreamy, come-to-bed eyes.

For he on honey-dew hath fed.

The man at my window had the features of a mogul warrior. High chiseled cheekbones, scaffolding for the olive skin. This is ridiculous. I had better things to do than mess with handsome strangers who wore gold earrings.

What if he had a switchblade under that Hawaiian shirt? A dagger stuck in his white cargo shorts? The FBI weren’t stupid. They knew things. He could be a serial killer. No one was accounting for my whereabouts and on reflection, it wasn’t Omar Sharif, at all. There was something more powerful in his bearing; something darker in his aura that warned me the man was trouble.

I shrugged, and before he could speak, I’d rolled the window back up, put my foot on the pedal and accelerated away from him. The sensible thing to do, of course.

I was looking back over my shoulder, embarrassed and trying to send some kind of lame apology but, in doing so, I managed to miss my exit. Now I would need to full circle the roundabout and that would mean having nowhere to go but towards the Hawaiian shirt again if I were to get out of the circle and onto Bangalow Road.

His thumb was still out but there was no stepping forward this time as the Golf approached him. He simply raised a quizzical eyebrow and grinned, a cheeky do-you-want-me-or-don’t-you-want-me kind of grin.

I kept my eyes straight ahead, making certain I’d catch the southbound exit this time. My intention in coming into the village had been to pick up a bottle of wine, the Echo and a few candles, not a stranger with God knows what mischief on his mind. Let someone else take their chances with him, I needed to ease myself carefully into the life of the Bay, get to know people.

I had my local rag and all I wanted was to get back to the shack and check out the Classifieds for a carpenter, someone good with timber. Once I had the place up to scratch I figured I would start inviting people around, create a bit of a salon of interesting Byron Bay types. I could forgive Wayne Young. And Di Morrissey might be up for teaching me something about novel writing. I would join a yoga class, maybe an outdoor painting group, a book club, bush walking, the local branch of the Labor Party. There were so many ways I planned on bringing myself up to speed as a fully-fledged Byronian woman.

As I was about to leave the roundabout, I glanced in the rear vision mirror. With the setting sun illuminating the hitchhiker’s physique and having just seen the man up close, staring him down for a second or two, but enough to have caught the sexy smile, my impulse was to reassess the whole aura thing. It wasn’t disturbing, it was just unusually powerful. In fact, I felt sympathy for the poor man and annoyed at my own rudeness and timidity. J. Edgar Hoover? What would that vicious old closet queen know about Aussie hitchhikers, anyway? Keats Street was up ahead. Keats reminded me again of Coleridge, the rich poetry. Opium-fueled. High on laudanum and magic phrasing. In Xanadu did ...

Kublai Kahn.

That was it! That was the image the man back there had brought to mind. Not Doctor Zhivago, but Kublai Khan. In Xanadu did Kublai Kahn... Xanadu. Caves of ice. Abyssinian maids strumming dulcimers. I slowed and let a cyclist overtake me, myself still overtaken by indecision.

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

The last line came to me as I pulled over onto the side of the road, reversed along the curb then leant over and threw the passenger door open.

I watched through the side mirror as he took his time sauntering up to the Golf. Rather than go straight to the open passenger door he strolled past on my side and around in front of the car, all the time keeping his gaze locked on me through the windscreen. Was he daring me to take off again? He stuck his head in the open door and smiled, one eyebrow raised and flashing the half-smart grin he had just given back at the roundabout. I got what it implied; recognition of a moment shared, a moral dilemma settled.

‘You’re sure about this?’ he said, tilting his head to the side, smiling with his whole face.

The American accent! Unexpected. I smiled back at him and shrugged. ‘Sure, I’m sure. Why not? You’re not an axe murderer, are you?’

‘No, lady, I’m not.’ Grinning, he tossed in his bag and without further discussion settled it on the floor at his feet then buckled his seat belt, and only then did he look my way. ‘You’re not a local,’ he said. A statement, not a question.

‘That’s an offence round here?’ Already, I regretted stopping for him. He was too masculine. Too cheeky. Too something. Too present beside me, that was it. ‘Suffolk Park,’ I said. ‘Any good to you?’

‘Suffolk Park?’ He sounded disappointed. ‘That’s fine. I’ll get out on the pub corner, okay?’

‘Sure thing.’

‘Pardon?’

I took my hands away from my mouth. I had been leaning forward while he settled in, resting my elbows on the wheel, breathing in recycled air between my cupped palms, something I did when anxious, when I needed to buy thinking time. ‘Sure,’ I said with what was intended as an insouciant shrug.

‘Thanks a lot. Its real kind of you. The pub corner at Suffolk will do just fine. I can pick up another lift from there, hey?’

His voice pitched soft and low. A man more used to intimacy than authority. Clutching at the wheel, I stared ahead through the windscreen and took in deep breaths. I could feel him observing me. Finally I put the Golf into gear and shot back on the road.

‘How long have you lived in Byron?’ he asked after we’d had gone a short way.

‘Since this morning.’

‘This morning?’

‘I bought a house here this morning. Doesn’t qualify me as a local, I know.’

No reaction to this. Instead, he turned his gaze and stared out his window. I compared him to the young kids who’d chatted to me the whole way in to the Great Northern. ‘You’d have to have lived here since its hippie heyday to qualify as a fair-dinkum Byron local?’ I said, turning to cast him an enquiring glance. ‘Since the ‘73 Aquarius Festival, I reckon. I get the feeling this place only hands out brownie points if you’ve lived here for yonks, right?’

‘I don’t mix much. I just hang in there and kinda do my own thing, y’know.’

‘California?’

‘I grew up around Los Angeles and San Francisco. Thousand Oaks, mostly.’

‘Nice place, huh?’

‘Small place. Good, though. Plenty of trees and open space back then. Where they filmed all those cowboy movies actually. Back then. Not now.’

‘Just visiting Byron?’

‘I guess so,’ he said as he stared out the window, then added softly, almost to himself, ‘But its been a long one.’

‘Oh, yes, how long?’

He spoke to a distant point outside his window. ‘Since ‘74.’

That came as a surprise. I kept looking across at him, admiring his strong profile, the baby-smooth skin of his suntanned neck and the hair that fell like black silk to his shoulders. Yes, he could trace his ancestors back to the plains of Mongolia, this one.

I returned my eyes to the road but kept the image of him alive in my mind’s eye. He wasn’t ordinary, this Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan of a man. No, he wasn’t ordinary. Neither was his musky scent ordinary. It had me imaging him in exotic places. I would put him in a desert, most likely. Corrugated sand hills stretching to a purple horizon. A turbaned head, a bejeweled scimitar tucked into his belt. Riding a camel at full tilt towards his Bedouin tent beside a palm-fringed oasis. Belly-dancers circling him, offering up their platters of dates and other desert delights.

I checked my mania, reigned in my too-fertile imagination, but understood the pull his physicality had on me and why he had attracted my attention back at the roundabout. He had secret places in him. His presence spoke of adventure.

While he had his face turned away, I made a further appraisal, admired how the sun caught the dark curly hairs glistening along the length of his strong forearms. A tattoo. An anchor. A man who lifted heavy objects. He looked fit. I guessed at early forties. Worked hard for a living. And from his tan, an outdoors guy. What was happening? His thighs were so close we were almost touching each other. When he turned from the window and smiled, I felt caught out.

‘I’ve got some of those brownie points I can share if you’d like them,’ he said with a grin.

‘I’ll manage on rations, thanks.’ I accelerated to get away from where that remark seemed headed. I had just enough smarts about me by now to know my head was not behaving.

When he lifted his left arm to pull down the sun visor, I noticed the scars buried in the hollow of his elbow. Strange. A couple of angry looking raised lines, a couple of inches long, purplish against the fairer skin of his inside arm. Some kind of accident, I figured.

‘Don’t suppose you need any work done around your home, timber work, carpentry?’ he said.

‘Oh, my god!’ I reached for the Echo and waved it at him. ‘Believe it or not, I came into the village to pick up the Classifieds. I’m desperate for a handyman!’ I looked out the window then back at him, shaking my head. ‘I knew there was a reason I stopped for you back there!’

‘Eventually,’ he said with a grin. He put his hand out. ‘Yuri. Yuri O’Byrne.’

‘O’Byrne? A touch of the Irish, hey?’ So much for Kublai Khan. That one had just ridden off into the sunset.

‘I guess. And Russian. On my mother’s side.’

We were back on the steppes. Kublai Khan lives!

‘Got it here, somewhere,’ he said, busily patting his shirt and shorts pockets, unfolding and refolding odd scraps of paper. ‘I’m a shipwright. Timber boats. He shot me a look that came with a raised eyebrow. ‘And a qualified carpenter.’

I waited while he continued to search the bag at his feet. Not the organized type. Finally he presented me with the business card. There was a phone number, but no address other than a post office box in Yamba. I studied the buff-coloured card, ragged and frayed at the edges with green writing and an attractive line drawing of a yacht in the right-hand corner. Yuri O’Byrne, Shipwright. Specialist in timber boats. Design. Building. Repairs. Maintenance.

‘I could cut you a good hourly rate. For cash. I’ve got no overheads.’

‘So, it seems.’ I placed his card on the dashboard. ‘The house is just around the corner. Well, it’s a shack, actually. Want to take a look?’

‘Sure thing. Why not?’

Why not, indeed?