Do You Love Me or What? Read online

  When you’re having the fun that life owes you, and you’re holding your sides with gusts of laughter, you could believe that what you were doing was heaven. In heaven, you don’t bother about old boats. Besides, it was his fault – he wouldn’t come on adventures with me.

  Winter was settling in.

  ‘The desert is getting cold,’ she said. ‘They said it on the news. The nights, they’re below freezing.’

  ‘She hates the cold,’ I said to him.

  I asked him to put a pot belly stove into the cabin, like the one in our house.

  ‘I’ll do it for you,’ he said. ‘Not for her. For our future. Your novel.’

  He was anxious to be proud of me.

  It was difficult work, the cutting of the hole in the roof, and the tiling of the podium. We did it while she was visiting her parents. It was a surprise to her. She was delighted.

  Over that winter it became her cabin. ‘My cabin,’ she’d say.

  Sometimes she’d invite people to stay in her cabin. There were parties that we weren’t invited to, though there were guests of our acquaintance amongst them, people from the mainland. I was embarrassed by that. They’d moor on our jetty, invite us to come and have a drink but the party was in her cabin and we felt out of place.

  There’s no laughter now. Even though her cabin is behind the main house, and a distance from the water, somehow the reflections from the bay ripple white light across the ceiling, white light across my sad hands. The furniture here in her cabin is mine, but the spirit is still hers. Now she’s gone, my furniture continues to be ruled by her; it looks bereft but it’s still the way she left it, the unexpected way she left it: the bedside table is perfectly square on to the bed, and the bedside table on the other side is also square on – not at an angle with the drawers open and piled with a tumble of clothes, like they were when she was here. The chairs at the old wooden table are now lined up like the unblinking soldiers you see in pictures of Buckingham Palace, the table is as clear and flat as the windswept desert. The sofa holds my cushions but the two blue velvet ones aren’t lolling on it like discarded toys; they’re proudly puffed up and standing on their corners like diamonds.

  When I was in the desert with the man I shouldn’t have loved, an Aboriginal woman came to our house when I’d been away, hiding, and without my knowledge, she’d cleaned my house. I only knew it when I dared to come home. She lived, like all her people did, outside her government-built house, and inside was only where you put things, and you only slept there on freezing nights or in thunderstorms. A house to them wasn’t a place to dwell in, to inhabit, not even a place where your possessions lived – because you had so few. You inhabited the earth. I found out later that she’d cleaned my house in shame, for her husband had gone crazy in my house and that was why I’d gone into hiding, and that was her shame. She did it like I’d never done. The carpet was swept, the nap revealing the careful, firm strokes of a stiff broom – no easy vacuuming for her; the windows were washed of fingerprints and red dust; the lampshades that hung from the ceiling were now white when I’d always thought them pink; red dust no longer made rosy the white window sills; the little wasp nests that festooned the walls up high were gone, the muddle of pens and pencils and rubbers and rubber bands were all tidied away in drawers or put into pots, the green-grey verdigris on the bathroom taps had vanished. Even the teapot had been scrubbed, inside and out. The man who I shouldn’t have loved, who always knew everything, said that her generation of girls was trained as housemaids in the houses of white mistresses.

  ‘They know what white women want,’ he said.

  ‘All of them? Know what all of us want?’ I asked stupidly.

  He often hated me.

  I suppose my friend had sat in the desert with the grandmothers over winter fires, tracing shapes with her white finger in the red sand as everyone recounted the demands of their mistresses of old who’d had so many possessions – all unnecessary. ‘I had to peg out the socks with plastic pegs and the pants with wooden pegs!’ ‘I had to iron their underwear!’ ‘I had to spend hours ironing sheets that would wrinkle as soon as they lay in them!’

  And as I gaze now in the silence at the perfect alignment of chairs in the cabin no longer hers, I ask: Had I in my fussiness about his boat become to her like those absurd mistresses?

  When we were at home alone, the man I love and me, I’d taken to sneaking a look at the cabin, her cabin. There were cigarette holes in the mattress. I knew that she didn’t smoke. That must mean, I realised, that she had a friend she hadn’t mentioned, probably a lover. It wasn’t surprising, for she was as pretty a woman as I’d ever seen. I collected half a dozen or so empty gin bottles and buried them in a big hole I’d dug out in the bush. I didn’t say a word to him, nor to her. And I assumed she wouldn’t notice empty bottles missing.

  After I did that, things started going wrong. Once, when we came back from a few days in the city and she came back from a few days with her parents, I noticed our fireplace was still warm, as if the fire had just been put out. Another time, again when we were all coming back, us from the city and her from her parents, she wasn’t at the mooring place at the public wharf to meet us as we’d planned. The people at the mooring were puzzled: they told me she’d been in such a tearing hurry to get home, she’d talked someone into giving her a lift. The man I love didn’t hear this conversation, and I didn’t pass it on.

  I didn’t know how to say to her casually, ‘You’ve had a visitor!’ Of course, I could’ve said ‘visitors’, which would be easier on us both – but nothing was easy by then.

  The next time we all returned together, all but one of the water tanks were emptied. We have no town water, we rely on those tanks. The man I love asked if I’d left the cistern on when we left. It’s a crime to leave the cistern on, for fear of leaks. I’ve known that since my mother’s time. I’m careful not to commit crimes, meticulous at turning off the cistern, it’s one of the things I do before I leave, I keep coming back to check, the way some people in the city can’t rest until they’ve gone back half a dozen times to check if they’ve turned off the iron.

  ‘I must’ve left it on,’ I agreed.

  She said nothing, she just gazed at the garden sadly.

  They must’ve really had a falling out, she and her visitor, a bad falling out. Perhaps she’d captivated him and then, when he wanted sex, she’d turned and said: ‘What’s all this fussing? This is out of the blue.’ I could imagine her saying that. There was something nun-like, strangely pure and shining-faced and sexless about her beauty.

  One deception was leading to another. Deceptions grow, accumulate, spread like a cancer. Cancers are silent. And deceiving severs the thin, shiny ribbon between you, I know that now.

  But I couldn’t ask her to go. I still hadn’t got what I’d wanted, there was something missing, there always is for me.

  The last time, we were in the city in bed when a huge thunderstorm broke. We both woke, and held each other.

  The man I love said: ‘Lucky she’s there. To look after the boat.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said happily.

  But at seven in the morning when the storm had died, we were woken again, this time by a phone call from her. The wind had swung the boat, his boat, under the ramp that leads to the pontoon. The pontoon rides up on the high tide, and as the tide ebbed out that dawn, the pontoon had returned with all its weight to settle on the mud, crushing his boat.

  He began weeping. I didn’t know how to comfort him. I didn’t need him to explain, though he explained again and again. It could only have happened if she hadn’t tied the boat at both ends.

  We raced to our island, getting a lift there from the mooring people.

  He tried to bring it back to life, his boat, with its crushed hull and its engine coated in mud. He cried all day and night.

  She somehow found us a derelict boat, abandoned, she said, amongst the mangroves. The man I still love looked up as she roared towards us in i
t, looked up from trying to bring his boat to life. He didn’t help her tie it to our jetty, but at least he looked it over.

  ‘No wonder it was abandoned,’ he said.

  ‘But it’ll go,’ she said. ‘That’s the main thing.’

  ‘It’ll ship water,’ he said, pointing to a hole in the side.

  ‘Not if you’re careful,’ she said.

  His laughter was high.

  ‘Either she goes, or I do,’ he said later.

  ‘Can I give her a month?’ I asked.

  ‘She must go this minute,’ he said. ‘No, that’s ungenerous. Tomorrow.’

  ‘Three weeks?’

  We settled on seven days.

  I kept deliberating how to tell her, what words to use, but I couldn’t find them. You’d think it was easy.

  ‘Might be time to push off,’ I could say. Or, ‘We’ll be needing the cabin for his painting.’

  No words were right. I tried to find them every morning in bed next to his warmth, but she and I would start pottering in the garden together, and the day would go. He and she would glare at each other over the table as we ate. She took to coming up to the house in the middle of the night for food.

  He took to glaring at me.

  After six days, when I still hadn’t said anything, as I stooped to weed the young spinach, she burst out of her cabin.

  She’d just been invited to a new desert community to work again as a nurse.

  ‘Did you apply for it?’ I asked, knowing my resentment was unreasonable.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘But word gets around. They know I’m good at nursing.’

  I wanted to ask why she hadn’t helped me nurse the boat, but I couldn’t.

  ‘When do you start?’

  ‘I’ll have to leave in a fortnight,’ she said. ‘Fourteen days.’

  ‘I’ll help you pack,’ I said.

  I pretended to him that I’d told her to go.

  He laughed. Somehow he knew I hadn’t.

  I helped them both pack. The two people I loved, I helped them both leave me.

  Just as he’d threatened, right on cue, out of the kitchen window I heard his boat shudder into life. I was drying the dishes. Not any folded tea towels in any drawer, not any promise of fun and laughter, nothing, nothing but that particular man and his particular ways could comfort me. I ran down to the jetty. There was no knowing how far he’d get with the ruined motor, how far with the crushed hull, whether he’d even make it to the mainland. I think he’d have been happy to die in his boat.

  I carried his bags and boxes onto the boat and his canvases, painted and unpainted. I helped him stow away. I wanted to get into the boat myself, sit there as if it was my place, to say, ‘I’m coming with you.’

  ‘Will you ring?’ I said. ‘When she’s gone, only thirteen days away now?’ He never carried a mobile.

  ‘Depends,’ he said.

  ‘On what?’ I asked.

  ‘Where I am. How I feel,’ he said. ‘You’ve taken no notice of my feelings. Someone’s got to.’

  He asked me to untie him. I’d always tied the boat up, I’m good at knots. But this time, untying him, I fumbled. My fingers seemed thicker. I couldn’t see the knot for sudden tears.

  The engine startled into life. I pushed him off. I pushed away the boat of the man I love. I watched his crippled boat go over the roundness of our body of water, the roundness that makes you realise that the planet is a circle. He didn’t turn back to wave.

  I listened to the news night after night. There were no accounts of a boat lost at sea, no account of blank canvases washed ashore. So I suppose he made it.

  He didn’t ring.

  Thirteen days later, we packed her things into the boat she’d found. We were silent. We’d been silent since he’d left. Anything I said seemed like small talk: ‘Sure you got everything?’ She was. ‘You’ll have to tell me how to contact you.’ She didn’t.

  She hadn’t even wanted me to go back in the boat with her, in case, she said, our combined weight took it below the hole, and then we’d ship water. She wanted to send someone from the mooring wharf with it, towing it back to me.

  But I insisted. I was the reckless one now. I wanted the excuse to go to the Brisbane wharf where he’d have landed. Somehow I talked myself into thinking he’d be there still, hesitating, on the verge of coming back to me, just needing a prompt. I imagined him standing there, his long, lanky body outlined by light, the edges of his shirt feathery with sun, one hand shading his eyes. He’d lift up his hand, holding it high and upwards, the wry way he always signalled when I was heading towards him in the boat. In a few minutes we’d swing around the corner and head towards the public wharf and he’d lift his dear hand in his special way, and as we slid near, he’d bend to catch the boat. I’d see his long arm reach out for me, his long-fingered elegant hand. His hands were always inquisitive and insistent as a dog’s nose, feeling for me, nuzzling me, making me touch him, his long arms enfolding me.

  But on that last trip I wanted to ask her the questions I hadn’t asked, I wanted to ask her whether she’d wanted to come to us or if I’d just made her feel obliged. I wanted to ask who her visitor was, and if they had fallen out. I wanted to ask whether she’d stayed for my friendship, or had it been to captivate the man I love? I wanted to ask whether she’d loved me – or what.

  But all through the journey, the silver river and our last time together rushed past, silent and unheeding.

  We turned the corner to the public wharf. I stumbled with the ropes and almost fell over when he wasn’t on the wharf, there were only the grey, weathered pylons. A gap in the air where I’d been sure he’d be. And then I knew the question I wanted to ask: Had I ever really loved anyone? Or had I just made them up: had I just loved thin columns of air?

  But there was no one to ask. I tried to act as if nothing was wrong, here in front of this stranger, once my friend. I stepped out and held the boat steady while she put out her bags. I’ve had a long training in deception. I was expecting a hug from her but she’d already picked up her bags and all we did was lean towards each other, her slim body suddenly bony, her hands full, the bags clanging between us. She straightened, turned, and didn’t wave, suddenly not at all waif-like, striding towards her own life.

  I drove the boat home slowly because my eyes were blurred.

  I took several goes to moor at our jetty, my jetty, because I couldn’t see exactly where the end plank was, for the tears. Sobs were even rocking the boat. Eventually a breeze took mercy on me and blew me into place with a soft thud. I tied up with both ropes, bow and stern.

  I opened her cabin door and sat on the sofa looking out at the river. A bird was calling out for its mate, its long echoes unravelling throughout the sky and into the room, into the furniture, the bed, the upright cushions, the neat table, the cupboard. Everything seemed to hold those echoes for ages. I waited till they faded. Then I stood and opened the cupboard, I don’t know why, in case there was something left of her, a last remnant. There was only a tinny clink of disappointed coat hangers and, on the floor, an empty gin bottle on its side I left the door open and went back to the sofa. I didn’t know what to do next, didn’t know how to fill in the time, how to fill in my life. It seemed pointless even to make a meal. I just sat and watched a grey evening crowd around the bay, until greyness filled the cabin like smoke.

  Her Laughter Like a Song of Freedom

  Gerard was a man who’d learned early to eke things out. When he was a child, his mother had come unexpectedly to his primary school one lunchtime and hugged him across the fence. Gerard had tried not to turn and check which children were looking. But that afternoon, when he let himself into his house with the key under the dead azalea, he found a note from his mother pinned by a knife to the doorframe. He thought he could make out the word ‘gold’. His father, coming home some hours later, said it merely read ‘gone to get dinner’. However, neither dinner nor his mother turned up and Gerard learned how to make t
he memory of a hug last. His mother on her eventual return seemed to be always frowning over a cigarette, as if cigarettes were her only hope, but even they betrayed her, he could tell that by the indignant way she stubbed them out in fierce circles on dishes, the sink, once even in the cat’s plate. Family dinners were so silent you could hear everyone swallowing. Gerard tried to time his swallows to fit in with his parents’ to be companionable, but no one noticed.

  Then, when Gerard was fifteen, his father, a laboratory attendant who stole laboratory bottles for no purpose that Gerard could see, was asked by his Laboratory Head one rainy afternoon to be driven to the bus stop. Gerard’s father was a procrastinator and hadn’t emptied the station wagon of his latest haul. It was difficult to converse, what with guilt, the rain and the jangling of so many bottles. The Head became suspicious and silent. The Department had been asking questions about the disappearance of laboratory equipment, including bottles. When the Head got out and before he put up his umbrella, he broke the rules of politeness and peered into the gloom of the station wagon. Shortly afterwards, Gerard’s father lost his job. Shortly after that, he left home, striding to the corner, his pocket ringing with all the coins he saved. At the corner, he turned to wave. He’d smiled a total of five times in Gerard’s childhood, from the time when Gerard began counting, which was when he was in kindergarten. So a wave seemed to belie the threat of imminent abandonment and gave the boy courage, and he jumped the gate (it was girlish to open gates, and he didn’t want his father to loathe him for being girlish) and he sped after his father.