Читать книгу The Life to Come - Michelle De Kretser - Страница 10

THE HOUSE BY THE RIVER belonged to an old man whose relationship to George Meshaw was complicated but easily covered by “cousin.” He had lived there alone, with a painting that was probably a Bonnard. Now he was in a nursing home, following a stroke, and George’s mother had taken charge of the painting. It was her idea that George should live in the house until it was clear whether or not their cousin was coming home. She had flown up to Sydney for the day, and George met her for a late lunch. George’s mother wore a dark Melbourne dress and asked the waiter for “really cold water,” between remarking on the humidity and the jacarandas—you would never guess that she had lived in Sydney for the first thirty-one years of her life. She bent her head over her handbag, and George found himself looking at a scene from childhood. His mother was on the phone, with the orange wall in the living room behind her. As he watched her, she bent forward from the waist, still holding the receiver. Her hair stood out around her head: George saw a dark-centered golden flower. He couldn’t have been more than six but he understood that his mother was trying to block out the noise around her—he folded like that, too, protecting a book or a toy when “Dinner!” was called—and that this was difficult because the room was full of the loud jazz his father liked to play.

Over the years, George’s mother’s hair had been various colors and lengths, and now it was a soft yellow sunburst again, still with that central dark star. She produced a supermarket receipt from her bag and read from the back of it: “Hair Apparent. Do or Dye.”

“The Head Gardener,” replied George. “Moody Hair.”

They were in the habit of noting down the names of hairdressing salons for each other. His mother said, “Also, I saw this in an airport shop: ‘Stainless steel is immune to rust, discoloration, and corrosion. This makes it ideal for men’s jewelry.’”

George and his mother had the same high laugh—hee hee hee—and otherwise didn’t resemble each other at all. The Bonnard was beside her, done up in cardboard and propped on a chair. When George asked what it was like, his mother said, “A naked woman and wallpaper. He needed an excuse to paint light.”

The house by the river was spacious and built of bricks covered in white render. It was late spring when George moved in, but the rooms on the ground floor were cold and dark. There were mortuary-white tiles on the floor, and the lights were fluorescent tubes that looked as if they would be fatal to insects. They had to be switched on even in the middle of the day. George remembered that his mother had described the house as “Mediterranean.” Ridiculous secondhand visions—a turreted pink villa with terraced gardens, a bowl of red fish at a window—had opened at once in his mind.

He had been back in Sydney for four years and still swam gratefully in its impersonal ease. In Melbourne, where George had lived since he was six, he had wanted to write about modernism in Australian fiction for his Ph.D. After some difficulty, a professor who would admit to having once read an Australian novel was found. At their first meeting, she handed George a reading list made up of French and German philosophers. When George settled down to read these texts, he discovered something astonishing: the meaning of each word was clear and the meaning of sentences baffled. Insignificant yet crucial words such as “however” and “which”—words whose meaning was surely beyond dispute—had been deployed in ways that made no sense. It was as unnerving as if George had seen a sunset in his east-facing window, and for a while it was as mesmeric as any disturbance to the order of things. When despair threatened, he transferred his scholarship to a university in Sydney. There, George read novels and books about novels and was wildly happy. He taught a couple of tutorials to supplement his scholarship. Recently, with his thesis more or less out of the way, he had begun to write a novel at night.

A loggia with archways ran along the upper floor on the river side of the house. That was where George ate his meals and sometimes came to sit very early, as the park detached itself from the night. Koels called, and currawongs—the birds who had whistled over his childhood. Fifteen minutes by train from the center of the city, he lived among trees, birdsong, Greeks. The Greeks, arriving forty years earlier, had seen paradise: cheap real estate, sunlight for their stunted children. Fresh from civil war and starvation, they were too ignorant to grasp what every Australian knew: this was the wrong side of Sydney. Where was the beach?

There were mornings when George left the house at sunrise, crossed the river, and turned in to a road that ran beside the quarried-out side of a hill. The sandstone was sheer and largely obscured by greenery: giant gum trees fanned against the rock, and native figs, vines, scrub. Brick bungalows cowered at the base of the cliff and skulked on the ridge above—it seemed an affront for which they would all be punished. In the moist, gray summer dawns, George felt that he was walking into a book he had read long ago. The grainy light was a presage. Something was coming—rain, for certain, and a catastrophe.

Opposite the quarry, on the river side of the street, driveways ran down to secretive yards. They belonged to houses that faced the river, with lawns sloping to the water. A sign warned that the path here was known to flood. But bulky sandstone foundations and verandas strewn with wicker furniture soothed—these houses were merely domestic, nothing like the foreboding on which they turned their backs.

After Pippa moved in, George often came home from his walk to the smell of coffee. They would drink it and eat Vegemite toast on the loggia, and then George would go to bed. Pippa, too, kept irregular hours. Saving to go overseas, she was juggling waitressing with part-time work in a sports store, and George could never be sure of finding her at home. That was fine; the idea was that they would live independently—at least so it had been settled in George’s mind. In her second year at university, Pippa had been in his tutorial “The Fictive Self”: a Pass student whose effortful work George had pitied enough to bump up to a Credit at the last moment. Not long ago, he had run into her near the Reserve Desk at the library. Her hair lay in flat, uneven pieces as if something had been chewing it. As the year drew to a close, a lot of students looked like that: stripey and savage. She had only one essay left to write, “in my whole life, ever,” said Pippa. A peculiar thing happened: she held out a piece of paper, and George feared he would see a note that began, Help! I am being held prisoner . . .

It was an invitation to a party. Pippa shared a house in Coogee with a tall, ravishing girl called Katrina. When George arrived, Katrina was standing by the drinks table on the side veranda, talking about her cervix. He placed his six-pack in a plastic tub of ice, and Pippa told him a few people’s names. George had left Marrickville on a warm day, but by the time he crossed the city, a southerly had got up. Every door and window in Pippa’s house stood open. The dim corridor and all the rooms were full of cold air. In his T-shirt and loose cotton trousers, George moved from one group of people he didn’t know to another, trying to get out of the draft. The girls didn’t seem to notice it. They were Sydney girls, with short skirts and long, bare arms. Recently, George had gone to an opening at a gallery in the company of a visiting lecturer from Berlin. The artist was fashionable, and the gallery’s three rooms were packed. Over dinner, the German woman expressed mild astonishment at the number of sex workers who had attended the opening. “Is this typical in Australia?” she asked. George had to explain that she had misunderstood the significance of shouty makeup, tiny, shiny dresses, and jewels so large they looked fake. Eastern suburbs caste marks, they identified the arty, bookish daughters of property developers and CEOs. George was still adjusting to them himself, after Melbourne, where the brainy girls wore stiff, dark clothes like the inmates of nineteenth-century institutions, with here and there an exhibitionist in gray. Pippa had stick limbs, that chewed fringe, a sharp little face. She would have made an excellent orphan: black sacking was all that was needed, and heavy, laced shoes. But she came out of the house in scarlet stilettos and leopard-print satin, and found George on the back patio. He had taken refuge there, in the lee of the kitchen door.

Ashamed to mention cold to this waif, George conjured a headache. Pippa offered Tiger Balm and the use of her room. The windows there were open: Katrina could be heard describing a minor surgical procedure on her ovaries. But when George shut the door and lay down, he was out of the wind at last. A long painting, purple and blue swirls, hung on the wall facing Pippa’s bed—George closed his eyes at once. Long ago, his mother had been a painter. A few survivors from that era—severe, geometric abstractions—could be seen in her flat in Melbourne, but for a long time now her involvement with art had been confined to the upmarket school where she taught.

George fell asleep. When he woke, Pippa was there on the end of the bed, unbuckling her sandals. She flexed her toes, then sat sideways and swung her feet up. They were small, chunky feet, George noticed, and her toenails were painted blue. Katrina passed down the corridor, saying something about her menstrual cycle. George wondered what she was majoring in. Gender Studies? Performance Art? Obstetrics?

“Communications,” said Pippa. She was drinking bubbly; it was the late 1990s, so people still called it champagne. The soft white plastic cup dimpled under her fingers, and Pippa remarked that she was stuck. The house would shortly be reclaimed by Katrina’s aunt, who was returning from Singapore. Another house had been found for the girls—Katrina’s family had several at their disposal—but it wasn’t available before the beginning of March. Katrina was moving home for the summer, but there were reasons why that wasn’t an option for Pippa. George told a lie about the purple painting and learned that it was the work of Pippa’s boyfriend, Vince. “He’s back at his folks’ place in Mudgee, to save money so we can go traveling next year.” She spoke of “Asia,” of “Europe,” collapsing civilizations in the sweeping Australian way.

In Marrickville, over Vegemite toast one morning, Pippa asked whether the barking wasn’t getting to George. He hadn’t noticed it but now heard the high, repetitive protest that went on and on. “He’s lonely, poor love,” said Pippa. “And bored. Stuck in a yard by himself with nothing to do for hours.”

“Greeks,” said George. “They don’t like animals indoors. It’s a Mediterranean thing. The Arab influence.”

Pippa said that in Mudgee they were exactly the same. “And no one in Vince’s family’s ever been outside New South Wales. No way do they know any Arabs, either.”

A few days later, she told George that the dog’s name was Bruce. He belonged to “a hippie dipstick” called Rhiannon, who was renting on the cheaper, landward side of the street. Pippa had grown up in a country town and still talked easily to strangers. Bruce was a kelpie cross, George learned. “Twelve months old. Rhiannon got him from the RSPCA. She drives him to an off-leash park when she’s got time, but she works in some mall up in Chatswood, so she’s got this huge commute. And then Tuesday night’s the ashram, Friday night’s the pub. She’s not a bad person, she just hasn’t got a clue. You should see her yard: she’s bought Bruce all these toys, like a dog’s a child.”

Pippa had offered to walk Bruce when Rhiannon was busy. “He’s a working dog, he needs exercise. Guess what she said? ‘Dogs should run free. It’s demeaning for an animal to walk on a leash. It does really confusing things to their auras.’”

It was good of Pippa to have tried to help, said George.

“I just feel so sorry for that poor dog.”

She said the same thing a few evenings later. Bruce was barking again. George heard him all the time now. It was difficult not to hold Pippa responsible. “I love animals,” she went on.

“That must be why you eat so many of them,” said George. He didn’t intend unkindness but was opposed to illogic. Pippa’s fondness for broad, blurry statements twitched his nerves. “I love India,” she once announced, after watching a documentary on TV. She had never been there. George, who had, most certainly did not love India. He could also see that these declarations weren’t really about animals or India but about Pippa: what they proclaimed was her largeness of heart.

She was saying that she had considered being a vegetarian. “But the thing with personal food restrictions is they make eating with other people really difficult. They destroy conviviality.” She brought out “conviviality” in the way people had once said “England” or “Communist”: as if it settled all discussion. George detected a borrowing: Pippa had come across the word somewhere and been impressed.

George looked on cooking as time stolen from books. When he invited Pippa to move in for the summer he hadn’t thought about arrangements for food. He would have been content to go on as usual, defrosting a pizza or grilling a chop. But the day after she moved in, Pippa said, “I’m going through a Thai phase. You can’t cook Thai food for one.” The cold, white, murderous kitchen filled with the scent of coriander and lemongrass pounded to a paste. George kept the fridge stocked with riesling and beer. Pippa stir-fried fish with spring onions and purple basil. She served a salad that combined ginger and pork.

With nothing said, they had divided the house between them. There were three empty bedrooms on the upper floor, but Pippa installed herself in a room off the hall. She liked to lie reading on a divan that stood under an aluminum-framed window. There was nothing else in what must have been the old man’s living room; he had dotted cumbersome furniture throughout the house. Any one of his rooms would have done as the set of a European play—the forbidding, minimalist kind.

Paperback novels accumulated around the divan. George looked them over one day when Pippa was out. Most were secondhand, and all had been published in the past twenty years. Pippa read nothing older, nothing in translation, and very little that didn’t concern women’s lives. Her knowledge of history was cloudy. Referring to a biography of Joan of Arc that she planned to read, she placed its heroine in the Napoleonic Wars. George’s own novel sang inside him. He was taking apart everything he knew and putting it back together differently in ruled A4 notebooks. He used a laptop for his thesis, but his novel had woken an instinct that mingled superstition and veneration, and he was writing the first draft by hand.

Summer intensified. George and Pippa ate mangoes for dessert. Their flesh was the same color as the wall behind George’s mother on that long-ago day with the phone. The memory of that scene kept following George around. It said so much about his parents: for a start, the invasive way his father played records full blast so that he could hear them no matter where he was in the house. And why hadn’t his mother turned down the volume before answering the phone? Think first! George wanted to shout. She often remarked that women of her generation had been deceived. He knew that this meant “I was deceived.” It was her way of alluding to his father’s girlfriends. She had left when she could no longer ignore them; the latest one had turned up on Christmas morning with a present for George. But the reason George and his mother ended up in Melbourne was a man she had met at a party. He lasted two years, just long enough for her divorce to come through, then scampered home to his wife.

Pippa produced a dish of bananas prepared with turmeric and cream. That was the evening two boys came to the door in search of the old man. They looked like teenage real estate agents, with ties and short, waxed hair, but suggested melodrama because they arrived during a storm. Lightning turned the sky biblical behind them. For a blazing, vertiginous instant, the iron veranda post was a cross. The boys shouted at each other in Vietnamese, over the downpour, and everyone shouted in English. At last, George wrote down the address of the nursing home, and the boys plunged back into the rain.

It rained for three days. George went on with his novel at night. The river rose, ran across the road, and stopped the cars. Long after the sun came back, and the traffic resumed, the path beside the river stayed treacherous with mud. George slept naked in the swampy afternoons; there was air-conditioning in the rooms upstairs. Pippa wore shorts and a lime-green bikini top; she was pretty much flat-chested. She rubbed ice cubes on her wrists and went barefoot on the tiles. George noticed her feet again. They were nuggety and rectangular, like a young child’s feet—even the sparkly turquoise nail polish belonged to a child. He wondered if Pippa bothered with right and left shoes.

George’s father taught computer science at a technical college on the North Shore. Two or three times a year, he met up with his son over a drink in the city; what followed was a conversation between strangers. George had left his new number on his father’s answering machine, but it was his mother who called. She was in Lausanne, where an expert had declared that the Bonnard was a fake. “A good fake, mind you,” said George’s mother. He could hear her breathing in Switzerland. “I guess I’ll be hanging on to the day job for a while.”

The phone often rang. George took down messages from Pippa’s friends. The friends dropped in. They stayed for meals. George and Pippa moved a table out to the strip of concrete that passed for a yard. They strung fairy lights over the back door, and set the table with blue-and-white plates; Pippa had found a cupboard full of old china. “I love pretty plates,” she said, giving them a wipe with a tea towel. She asked if George was sure he wouldn’t change his mind about dinner. George said again that he really needed to work.

One night, he stretched his arms, cracked his spine, left his desk. Standing on the loggia, he identified Katrina: her voice floated up, describing the mole between her breasts. He had retained a distinct mental image of her breasts, George discovered. As a change from Thai, Pippa was serving prawns with lemon juice, brown bread and butter. George had seen her tip the prawn heads into the bin—they would stink like anything for the rest of the week.

He was returning from his walk one morning when eggs for breakfast passed from an idea into a need. He went up to the shop on Illawarra Road. The eggs had just hit the pan when Pippa came into the kitchen; there were tiny grains of sleep in the corners of her eyes. George watched her arrange the remaining eggs in a green majolica dish. She picked up the empty carton. “These are cage,” she said. “You should get free-range.”

George replied that free-range chickens, too, were killed.

“But there’s no unnecessary suffering.”

George picked up a metal spatula. He almost said, Ah! So that’s OK, then. He said nothing: he had remembered, just in time, that he was talking to someone whose idea of ethics was a dinner party. Besides, his eggs had started to brown.

In February, a heat wave struck. The air-conditioning gave out. At night, after Pippa came home from the dinner shift, George would light mosquito coils and a lantern. They sat on the loggia drinking mojitos; Katrina and her boyfriend had left a present of a bottle of rum. George asked one or two questions about Katrina. There was room for a character like her—a minor figure—in his novel.

Pippa said, “That’s a relationship where the names say it all.” George looked at her. Her eyes were bright with dislike. “The Kat and the Matt,” said Pippa. There was mint and sugar on her breath.

On one of the mojito nights, the inevitable happened: Pippa grew confessional. She wanted to be a writer, she told George. When she got back from overseas, she intended to enroll in a creative writing course. George thought back to her essays: a stew of passionate opinion, mangled argument, atrocities of usage and grammar; that Credit had been the purest largesse on his part. He remembered her hanging back one day, as the other students were dispersing, to say, “I love English.”

“In that case, I suggest you learn to write it,” answered George.

Pippa was talking about her travels now: they were to provide her with raw material, experiences. George, whose novel was set in Heidelberg, where he had spent a day at the age of nineteen, said that literature and the world were two different things. Pippa grappled with this, slitting her eyes. She said, “You mean, look in thy heart and write?” George meant nothing of the kind: girls like Pippa understood “heart” as a license to gush. But coming from her, the quotation so astonished him that he merely grunted. He divided what was left of the cocktail between them, and ran his finger around the rim of the jug.

They were eating strawberries; Pippa had brought a big, soft bag of them home from work. Passing along the loggia the next morning, George saw a cut-glass bowl of miniature Father Christmases. Overnight, each berry had grown a moldy white beard.

Day and night, bushfires burned in the mountains. Sitting out on the loggia, George and Pippa could smell the smoke. But there was no longer the high, intolerable sound of barking: Pippa had persuaded Rhiannon to give her a key. Bruce tore up and down the yard, chasing the ball Pippa threw for him; he slept, content and exhausted, for hours. Sometimes she sneaked the dog out and took him for a walk along the river. She invited George to go with them, but he explained that he was allergic to pets. He was conscious of a fresh danger: Rhiannon’s landlord wanted his house back, and she was having difficulty finding a rental place that would let her keep a dog. It looked as if she might have to return Bruce to the pound. The way Pippa relayed all this, George got the distinct impression that she was putting out feelers. So when she said, “I thought it was cats people were allergic to?” he answered firmly, “Dogs, too.” There was no point raising anyone’s hopes.

Autumn came, and George’s father died. A classic end, a cliché, really: lobbing a ball into a net one minute, a massive coronary the next. He was between girlfriends, as it turned out, so it fell to George to pack up his flat.

The flat was only a couple of streets away from the Meshaws’ old house. George hadn’t been in that part of Paddington for twenty-three years. The last time he saw his father, they had eaten big, juicy kangaroo steaks—George remembered the blood slobbering out across their plates. Running lightly up the stairs, he dreaded entering the flat. But it was as impersonal as a showroom. His father had never been a hoarder; even the piano seat held only a cardboard wallet filled with dull documents. One of them was a birth certificate. George knew and always forgot that Meshaw wasn’t his father’s real name. Syllables had been trimmed, vowels altered, consonants suppressed to create something that could fit into Australian mouths. His father was a product of the old world, and his vices, like his virtues, had been old-fashioned: wine, women, music, an unshakable faith in the rational mind.

The last item in the wallet was a yellow envelope. George hesitated, afraid of embarrassment, of pornography—there had been a packet of condoms beside the bed—but at last he looked inside. The envelope held twenty or so Polaroids. They were photographs of George’s mother, angled, arty shots, many of them out of focus—one showed only a blurry fan of fingers. George crouched, moved his hand, spread the images over the floor. The instant before he examined the last one, he already knew what he would see: his mother, bending forward from the waist, a wavy cord trailing to the phone. Everything in the photo was exactly as George had remembered—the orange wall, his mother’s bright, dark-centered hair—although the image had taken on a brownish yellow tinge. What memory had blanked from the scene was his father’s presence: he must have been there, in that room full of jazz, aiming the camera at his wife. The pieces in the puzzle of George’s parents shifted, acquired new angles. All the Polaroids showed that yellow discoloration; the chemicals were breaking down from exposure to light. George pictured his father handling the photos, laying them out like data along the lid of the piano. He studied the images again: unstable proofs of tenderness, the only photos in the flat.

That evening, he called his mother. She hadn’t come up for the funeral, merely saying, “I’m sorry for your loss.” George told her about finding the Polaroids. What he was really saying was, Do you understand now? Admit you were wrong to leave him! He started to describe the photo with the phone and the orange wall.

His mother cut him short, saying that she remembered the picture. “The one where you can see my roots have grown out? It’s so typical of your father to have kept that. I never liked it—I didn’t like you poking that camera at me ever.”

“Wait,” said George. “I took that picture?”

“All of them. Don’t you remember?” She said, “An idiot girl gave you a Polaroid camera. It became your favorite thing. You loved watching the colors change as the image developed. When you ran out of film a second time, your father told you the camera was broken. He knew that seeing you with it upset me.”

With the change of season, it was cool at night. George stood on the loggia, inspecting the loose shapes of trees. There was only ugly furniture around him and big, tiled, silent rooms. Pippa was living in Stanmore, in a house with Katrina. Bruce was barking—he had been barking for hours; Rhiannon must have talked her way into staying on, after all. George had just finished the first draft of his novel. It was called Necessary Suffering. At least for now; that was one of the things George wanted to think about. But first he had to put together the puzzle of his parents. Sometimes the reason his father saved the Polaroids was George’s mother and sometimes it was George—sometimes even the idiot girl was involved. George’s brain wouldn’t stop showing him the photo with the telephone. He saw his mother folded in two with her back to the wall. Something like a smudge kept dancing on the edge of his mind. To study it calmly, George turned it into a sentence written out in black on the white frame of the Polaroid: “Maybe she was trying to get away from me.”

The sun rose over the misty park: an autumn sun, a flat red disk that had strayed from a Japanese print. Later that day, George closed the door of his father’s flat for the last time and went for a walk. It was a bright afternoon, but the street where the Meshaws had lived was black with shadows. Tall plane trees arched over it; the leaves remained thick overhead but were starting to change color and fall. George saw what he had known, what he had forgotten: the row of houses, with their wooden balconies, looked into the face of a sandstone escarpment. He came to a gate where he had stood on a summer morning: looking back at the house where he had always lived, looking out at the waiting taxi. The escarpment and the trees kept the sun from the street. What was coming was a life in which his father was a stranger. George looked from his father, barefoot on the veranda, to his mother, sitting in the taxi with her face turned away. Who was the cat and who was the mat? George’s father said, “If you stop crying, you can keep anything that falls out of my pockets.” Then he stood on his hands.