Do You Love Me or What? Page 8

  The second lesson she learned was how difficult it was to let The Baby be minded by someone else. Peter could always stay behind with her on The Evening, but Bob, after he got the prize, would stride over to Diana and say, voice loud with generosity, that they were a good team. He hadn’t thought that about their love. So a friend minded The Baby, an old friend who’d forgiven her.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Peter asked her as the prize ceremony went on. For each category, one name was read out, the winner. The prizes weren’t money, but metal objects too big to put in a drawer and too ugly to put on a table.

  ‘I don’t remember why we came,’ she said.

  Peter checked the program.

  ‘You’re in the last category,’ he said. ‘A long way to go.’

  ‘My arms are aching for her,’ she said.

  To pass the time, she went to the Ladies. She did a pee and came out of the closet, and took her time washing her hands. Someone came out of another closet, and at the dryer, Diana saw Narelle. Perhaps Narelle mightn’t look up. But there were big mirrors behind the taps and Narelle wasn’t a woman to pass by a mirror. She met Diana’s eyes. She started.

  It was Diana who spoke.

  ‘How are your dogs?’

  ‘I had to give them up,’ Narelle said.

  ‘Oh, that’s sad. Why?’

  ‘Because of the child.’

  ‘What child?’

  ‘We had to let the dogs go. She thought she belonged to them, not to us!’

  Even in her confusion, Diana saw the O that Narelle made to touch up her lipstick was heart-shaped.

  ‘That must’ve been hard for you,’ said Diana, confused. ‘Losing the dogs, I mean.’

  Narelle scrabbled in her makeup purse. Diana found herself peering into Narelle’s makeup purse with her. It was crowded with broken brown and black kohl pencils and their shavings, crimson and vermilion lipsticks without their lids. The sides of the purse were grubby, the plastic lining torn.

  ‘She was a premmie,’ Narelle was saying as she searched, so her eyes were on the purse, not on Diana. ‘I couldn’t carry her the full thirty-nine weeks.’

  ‘You never mentioned you had a child,’ Diana said.

  Narelle looked up uncomprehendingly.

  ‘In the old days,’ Diana stumbled.

  ‘I’m sorry that you couldn’t conceive,’ Narelle went on, also confused but at last finding a blusher and applying it with deft strokes. A garden of roses bloomed on one cheek. ‘Bob told me.’

  Of course Bob would tell her, they were a couple, of course he’d tell her.

  Narelle grew a garden of roses on the other cheek.

  She slammed her makeup purse shut, and Diana noticed, in the way the mind snags at details, that the garden on one of Narelle’s cheeks was far more prolific than on the other.

  ‘It’s not all beer and skittles,’ Narelle was saying. ‘I didn’t want a child but Bob was longing to have one more. To prove his manhood.’

  ‘But Bob can’t …’ Diana said, and stopped. Narelle was already out the door.

  ‘He can’t have.’ She watched herself say it, but only her reflection was listening.

  Something seemed to have gone wrong with the plumbing. The toilets wouldn’t switch off. The cisterns were all constantly filling, each one at a different rate, some roaring, some high-pitched, some chugging, one coughing. It wasn’t at all like being in a public bathroom; she seemed to be inside a cataract. And at the same time, astonishment was flickering, there in a bathroom with the cisterns going wild.

  And then another woman burst open the door, bringing a blast of the ceremony she’d forgotten.

  ‘They’re still nowhere near your category,’ said Peter. ‘You were gone for ages. I’d thought you’d fallen in.’

  She didn’t sit down.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ she said.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  The next day, the phone rang just as The Baby, newly awake, was screaming in hunger.

  ‘You won!’ Bob was saying.

  ‘Just a moment. I’ll go outside,’ Diana said.

  She went out into the street.

  Bob asked why she’d left the ceremony last night and, before she could think of an answer, he told her that as the team leader he’d been obliged to go up to the stage to accept her prize. She could tell from his voice what a difficult walk that had been, his arms not held high but flapping by his side.

  ‘I said I’d mentored you,’ he said. But he interrupted himself:

  ‘Wasn’t that a baby I heard? I saw you with a new man.’

  She swallowed. She dreaded what this was leading to.

  ‘You’re cutting out,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Your new man – did he come already with a family?’

  She fell silent.

  ‘You’re cutting out again. Who’s your provider?’

  He suspects Narelle. He’ll abandon the child, just as he abandoned me. He’s an abandoner.

  ‘Jesus – couldn’t she bloody get herself a decent provider?’ she heard him shout, a man demented. Perhaps the hospital had sent two letters, and he’d picked up one.

  Speech is slow, hindered by the unwieldy tongue and only eight muscles. The brain has a far greater advantage: a hundred billion neurons, each making thousands of contacts at any moment, so that their combined contacts exceed the number of elementary particles in the universe.

  In the time that Bob’s eight muscles took to utter those angry words, dozens of images had cascaded through Diana’s mind: some: the slide of Narelle’s brush painting pretend gardens on her cheeks; the wet slick on Bob’s lips when he told her that, in Tahiti, his heart would grow fonder of her; her own arms raised with the pleasure of lifting high a knife, a spade, an axe at the man she now hates; herself shouting to the entire neighbourhood – not that he lived there – that his sperm couldn’t swim; that his new child wasn’t his, that he’d got what he deserved.

  But then Peter came out and stood in the open doorway with The Baby screaming, still in her white wrappings, her angry arms flapping like the wings of a white cockatoo in flight, and in a new cascade of images, The Baby taught Diana the next lesson: a little child on all fours uncertain who she belonged to, of how she fitted in, of who she was; and then a memory: Diana about ten years old and looking up from her book in the school playground, furtively watching a group of girls playing skipping. A girl at each end turns the rope. The game is to choose the moment to run in – so you wait till the rope loops up into the blue sky, then, and only then you dash to join the jumping, giggling, chanting, hugging group, the ones who’ve made it to the centre.

  Diana’s new to this school, so she goes back to her book – she always carries two in her bag, in case of emergencies; but she looks up when there’s a familiar loud sniff to see Gillian, an even newer arrival with a face as pale as the paper they write on, dreary grey hair of the wriggly sort where each strand refuses lie down with the other strands, and a perpetual sniff. Gillian is tracking the turning of the rope, pushing her spectacles into place on her nose. Sniff. Sniff. Diana feels a flash of impatience even with the girl: doesn’t she know people like us have to hide in books? But the silly girl is clearly thinking that if she could only get to the centre of that turning rope, then she’d jump and giggle and chant and hug. Afterwards, someone would run upstairs to class with her, talk to her in class, look out for her, do homework with her, whisper to her, confide in her, walk arm-in-arm with her. Even Sally Tinsdale is jumping and giggling at the centre, Sally whose clothes are always dirty, and Barbara Fryer who never knows the answers and Wendy Thomas whose brother is in jail. It’s worth risking a rope burn, Gillian’s face says, to get to heaven.

  Diana thinks of offering Gillian her spare book, but it’d look like friendship and someone might see.

  She can tell Gillian’s saying to herself: now the rope is about to thwack the ground – it’d be unsafe to r
un in now but you could do it now while it’s looping high. Now – it’s unsafe – now – safe. Unsafe – safe. Sniff. Sniff.

  Gillian, arms flaying, feet kicking up behind her, launches her dash but she’s thwacked, her back is thwacked by the remorseless rope. The girls at the centre, even the girls turning the rope, everyone heaves with laughter. Gillian tries again, she’s lashed again. At her third attempt, she’s tripped by her own feet; she’s sprawled on the ground. The playground heaves with wicked glee. The rope keeps turning; Gillian’s in its path, it’ll lash her head, her ear is lashed, a terrifying spurt of red blood is in her hair and even her spectacles skitter away to gleam at her mockingly.

  ‘Stop,’ yells Diana against the noise but she doesn’t want to be heard, and no one hears. Someone starts a chant and the skippers all join in:

  ‘Out of the way. Out of the way.’

  Lash. Turn. Lash. Turn. Lash. The bell to signal the end of lunch time clangs against the bright sun and the elation. The rope pauses mid-way through the blue sky and flops, the skippers meekly run for their bags, the rope’s a mere circle bundled up by a turner, everyone runs to class, no one looks back.

  Gillian and Diana inherit the playground. Only the birds sing now. Somewhere, a dog barks. Distant traffic hums.

  Gillian stirs, sits up, feels around for her spectacles. She reaches out for them. Sniff. Sniff.

  ‘Your ear – is it all right?’ Diana asked, coming near, not too near.

  Gillian is too busy dusting herself down and rearranging her dress to answer. Streamers of red clump her grey hair. She attempts to put her spectacles on, but she can only use her good ear. They dangle uselessly down her face. She staggers to her bag, spectacles banging, she’s sniffing, bloody-eared, bloody-kneed, round-shouldered, blind, cowed. Without a glance at Diana, she slouches out the playground gate.

  Diana’s brain explosions quietened; at last there was peace. Forever after, in idle moments, when she was carrying out the garbage or driving on quiet country roads, long, long after, she wondered if the thought that followed was what Bob might call precious material, or was it just the thought of a coward? The thought: that those of us who’ve somehow found a temporary place in this slippery whirling world must hold out a hand to those who haven’t.

  What she said:

  ‘The Baby is Peter’s.’

  And she clicked off the phone.

  With thanks to Tobias Wolff’s ‘Bullet in the Brain’.

  Small talk

  She only knew the desert in her country from postcards she’d find at markets or bookshops, and she’d send them overseas to friends to seem interesting and exotic.

  This is my country, she’d write.

  As if she belonged to it all, as if she knew what belonging to a country meant.

  She was a child of migrants who’d settled here at various stages over a century, sheltering from who knows what deeds done against them. They’d been too traumatised to tell. She’d only lived in the Europeanised, Americanised cities on the coastal rim, crammed with new settlers, and longed to be with people who deeply belonged to this country, who’d belonged here forever, so that something of what they were might help her belong more. Might help her come home.

  One day the longing became too great to bear. It so happened that she had a childhood friend who’d become a nurse for a tribe in the desert in the middle of the continent, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest town. In her twice-a-year emails, Pat would apologise for being so seldom in touch; she was just too busy. Once, she explained that she’d given up on her family and they’d given up on her, that she survived on Tim Tam biscuits from the bush store and that she wore the same clothes all week.

  Diana told her friend she was coming to look after her.

  ‘What language do they speak there?’ she wrote.

  Some weeks later a tape arrived in the mail, with no accompanying letter, just a note scribbled on the back of a torn envelope saying that the language on the tape wasn’t quite the right language because it hadn’t been written down yet, but this was more or less the same. Diana listened to the tape every night, surprised that in a desert where surely everything was just sandhill after sandhill, the people had evolved such a big vocabulary and a complicated way to speak. But she wasn’t daunted. Then she took three months off work, bought a second-hand Land Rover and drove for ten days. She was like a woman possessed.

  She knew she’d reached the desert when the ground turned from black to the colour of sunsets, blushes, apricots. She left the tarred roads behind, often stopping to consult a map. There was never anyone to ask. Behind her, dust rose like smoke. She camped at nights, lighting fires and heating cans of food. At first she was frightened of the heat, dingoes, snakes, spiders, axe-murderers. She’d never been a brave woman, but she became one now because she was in love with her mission. In early light the dust was mauve, the mulga trees were olive, the mountains were emerald green. By mid-morning the ground was red, the mountains Prussian blue. As she drove, yellow light moulded mountain ranges into hundreds of smaller hills, sometimes with gold outcrops that in another country she’d glimpse and think, Aha! That’s a castle over there! But here there were no castles, no buildings, no sign that humans existed. Or were there? The thought crossed her mind that the people she was soon to talk to might be able to see signs invisible to her. Once, she stopped for a break at a dried-up claypan where there were hundreds, probably thousands of small, almost perfectly formed hexagonal clay clumps like pieces of a giant board game. She picked one up and beneath it was another, and another, and another, all the same shape. She crouched there alone in a space so vast and still that even a breeze seemed a dramatic act. After a while, she was ready to believe, like Pythagoras, that the purity of line of a geometric shape represents something fundamental and as yet undiscovered about the universe. Above her hung a low, intense cloud, itself like a phantom mountain. She drove on, but when she looked in her rear-view mirror, she saw that the dust behind her was now rising like uncertainty.

  Another night it rained, sweeping, adamant rain that brought leaks to her tent. The next day was sunny and still again as if nothing had happened, but in a matter of hours, it seemed, there were William Shakespeare type neck ruffs of green lacy weeds around the roots of gaunt tree trunks so twisted with light they seemed as graceful and weightless as ballet dancers. Only the heat seemed to hold them down. By early evening of that day, she’d travelled beyond the mountain range and was in country so flat, with trees so low, that when she turned on her heel, she saw the entire circle of the horizon spinning by. She didn’t put up her tent but lay under the dome of stars, watching the trajectory of the Southern Cross move directly above her toes, then above her stomach, above her chest, above her head. Until dawn, the black sky was spangled all the way down to the ground, all around her.

  She felt herself become braver.

  After many wrong turnings, she found a notice announcing her friend’s community, and then she came upon a windmill pumping bore water, and now her heart was hammering with excitement. She came to a village that looked like any ordinary village, though the earth was the colour of ripe tomatoes. She passed naked black children laughing and shouting at a burst water main, their teeth startlingly white, and there was Pat at her gate, her once black hair now grey, her once slender body now chubby, her face like the face Diana remembered, but her wide toothy smile now disappeared into bulging cheeks and many chins.

  ‘Look at you!’ Pat said, for Diana was city slim and elegant, though her glossy skin was dusted with red. Their friendship used to be edged with competitiveness. There was a touch of envy in Pat’s voice now, Diana noted with a small puff of satisfaction.

  After they’d hugged and taken the bags inside the house and had a cup of tea, Pat said she was just about to drive around doing the evening delivery of tablets to people who might otherwise forget to take them.

  ‘Isn’t this after hours?’ Diana said.

  Pat laughed at the notio
n, and Diana saw that her old friend was full of an energy that seemed to bounce off her olive skin. Even her greying hair curled energetically.

  ‘You can come but don’t get out of the car,’ said Pat.

  ‘Why ever not?’

  Diana was eager to be introduced, eager to begin talking.

  ‘It’s uncouth. Evening is family time. And don’t look at them. That’s uncouth too.’

  ‘Looking is uncouth?’

  ‘Just glance up, and look down again. That’s their way.’

  They drove around the ripe tomato streets, Diana sitting in the car trying not to look, but still peeking. The people were so dark-skinned that in the evening light they seemed like shadows or burnt tree trunks. They didn’t seem to live inside their houses but around them, sitting in groups on gaudy blankets in the dust, women cooking over a small fire, men in other circles gambling, children sometimes playing with each other, sometimes sitting quietly with the women. There were large flat boards set on flour drums she first took to be tables and looked around for chairs, but then she realised that the boards were probably beds. So the people slept under the stars as she had, she thought. Television sets were flashing colours and mumbling English in some yards, but they seemed like guests everyone ignored.

  ‘Are people talking about me?’ Diana couldn’t resist asking as they drove to the next house.

  ‘They notice everything,’ Pat said. ‘They seem to read people’s bodies.’

  That thrilled Diana. Surely they’d see how eager she was to talk with them.

  She was ready to forgive the grubbiness of it all, the walls of the houses stained with greasy hand marks, the cars rusting and dismantled in yards, the litter of papers and plastic bottles blown against fences and trees. After all, she told herself to calm her nerves, they’d always been nomads and probably never had to think about cleaning up, just moving on to the next camp and leaving animal bones and seeds and chaff to the wind.