Six 
This night of rising water I see a bedspread. Very clearly. It looks like this: pure white, elegant in its prewar fashion, the size of a double bed, and at its centre a large faint yellow stain. The whole, in spite of or perhaps because of this aged blemish, elaborate and beautiful in its design and texture and feel. But there is no double bed. There is a single bed and the bedspread is folded to fit upon it. I look more closely at the stain till it has assumed the proportion of a large estuary. And floating up that estuary a ship, ambling up the broad reaches of the lower Derwent River.
An old rustbucket of a steamer contracted in that year 1957 to bring wogs from Europe to Australia. And upon its deck, is an ashen-faced Sonja, wearing a long coat, clutching a three-year-old child to her hip: me. And the child is smiling and laughing his weird, gurgling giggle. Because the idiot child recognises his other home, that is to his mother a strange country.
Sonja and Harry
When she first saw it from the ship, Sonja fell to weeping.
‘What is this place that you have brought me to?’ she asked of Harry. The town, with its wooden buildings that teetered and sloped at all angles in consequence of their age and a lack of care and money, with its huge purple mountain that rose behind its offspring like a crabby matriarch ready to strike out at anybody who badmouthed her child, this town looked like a nightmare. None of the town made any sense to Sonja. It was painted in the drab colours favoured by the English, and the sky was black with clouds that threatened to rain but didn’t. Yet, as their ship shimmied up the Derwent River, the town glowed a rainbow of colours in the winter light of late afternoon. The town looked crabbed and cramped, hemmed in by olive-coloured forests on all sides bar that of the sky-blue river that defined its front, yet it seemed open to something that Sonja had closed her mind to many years before. The town was obviously not old, only a hundred or so years, yet in the streets they walked down from the ship Sonja could smell something much older, the smell of the receding tide, the smell of salt and drying kelp. This world that seemed like it ought be full of people was largely empty. Through a stillness so vast that it seemed an ocean, the wind cracked and swept from every angle as they walked the quiet, empty streets.
‘What is this place?’ Sonja asked again.
‘What do you reckon it is?’ said Harry, somewhat annoyed at what he felt to be a pointless and silly question. ‘It’s Hobart.’
They saw a man arguing with a telegraph pole, and a woman pleading with him not to make a fool of himself.
‘Piss off,’ said the man, ‘this is private.’
They saw a woman sitting in a gutter with pigeons, laughing as they fed from her hands. They saw a drunk fisherman stagger out of a pub with half a broken beer bottle in his face.
‘I went searching for the pink-lipped abalone and found this instead,’ he said to Sonja and Harry, then staggered away, weeping not from pain but out of an infinite sadness.
Sonja grew harder with the years that then passed. She was wont to recall her time in the Radovlica chain factory as a young woman. ‘You know what they made? Chains - not dog chains or little necklace chains, but those huge heavy things that ships use. And our job was to lift and stack them.’ She would at this point normally pause and reflect upon her time in the chain factory, to the memory of which she remained inextricably shackled, then look back up with her pupils reflecting rusty steel, saying, ‘And I never want to carry chains again.’ In this regard - that of material betterment - Harry was to prove an ongoing disappointment, never being able to rise out of the class he had been born into and, worse still, seemingly content to sink further into it. Nevertheless, Sonja’s relentless industry and astonishingly focused purpose meant that they did get a home and they did in a few short years manage to pay it off, and they did manage to be if not affluent, well then, neither struggling. And they did manage to share a dream. Of a large family.
But after me, there were no more children. Why? I don’t know. Certainly not for want of trying, because I can now see a whole sequence of ever more desperate couplings of Harry and Sonja taking place before my eyes. She blamed it on the drink and was inclined in her more perverse moments to see his lack of a thumb as a portent of a more fundamental incompleteness that she ought to have heeded. They went to the doctor, who sent them on to a specialist, an aspiring young man called Mr McNell, who assured them that it was almost certainly Sonja’s fallopian tubes and that this could be easily remedied. Sonja was hospitalised and endured an excruciating procedure in which air was pumped through her tubes to clear out supposed obstructions. This was repeated at monthly intervals for a year and at the end pronounced a success by Mr McNell, who told them that there was now no scientific reason why the couple could not have children. Now the nature of their couplings changed from desperate desire to a huge sadness. For Sonja felt her body to be a husk, its purpose stolen from her, and her husband’s attention a futile mockery of the consequences that ought to have flowed from such passion. Now she lay beneath him and did not move and did not milk his testicles with her hand. She lay beneath him and closed her eyes and saw herself back in the chain factory.
Harry and Sonja’s marriage was not, then, a great success. No, I’ll rephrase that. Harry and Sonja’s marriage was as unpredictable as this river. It could be terrible. They would stand screaming at one another and Sonja would sometimes lay into poor old Harry with her fists, and he would hold her out at arm’s length, preventing her landing a blow while she flailed her fists and berated him with every Slovenian curse peculiar, not to that nation, but to Italy. ‘Slovenians,’ she would remind him, ‘are too polite to invent their own swear words. That’s why we use the Italians’ instead.’ Not that Harry was always successful in avoiding her fists: sometimes she managed to strike him. Over the years he grew quieter and drank more, and tried to avoid antagonising her, which was harder than avoiding her wild punches, because there was much about Harry that irritated Sonja immensely and it would sometimes take only a careless sentence to send her off again. Over the years, her early passion spent, she grew physically distant with Harry, went limp in his hugs and stiff if he came up from behind and kissed her on her neck. She particularly despised him kissing her on the mouth. Her lips would remain frozen and her face unmoving and she would say, ‘Finished now?’ Or, ‘Can I get back to what I was doing now you’re happy?’ She found him shabby, dishevelled, and ill-kempt. He found her cold, removed and uninterested in him. Over the years she changed from a young, somewhat wayward and even wild woman who wanted to leave her past behind to one that increasingly wallowed in a past that never existed. She dressed ever more conservatively, took up going to church, and kept the house looking like a museum of rundown and recycled Mitteleuropa. She became an old European mama. But for all that and all that, it was not a bad marriage. Sonja loved Harry with a passion, albeit an ever curioser one, and he in turn loved his lady of the clove dust, as he sometimes whispered to her as they lay in bed. And for all her coldness, there were times in that bed when she revelled in being with Harry. I am a witness to their lovemaking much against my will, for it is not the way I wish to see my parents. I am, as I have said, a private person and this intrusion upon their privacy seems somewhat unfair. What is evident from what I see is that while Harry knew he loved her, even if he would never understand her, Sonja knew she understood Harry and wondered therefore if he was worth loving.
Long after, as Harry was dying, he thought about the day he and Sonja had arrived in Hobart, thought of the love he had once had for Sonja, the love that had seemed so strong, that had seemed so eternal. Where had it gone? As he lay there with the drips spiralling around his cancer-bloated belly he remembered Sonja and what they had and what they had lost. Why do such things so often prove so transitory? In the end he thought that he hated Sonja. But then, in the methylated-spirit afterscent of the ward, the smell of the flesh of her back as he lay curled up behind her came back to him and the smell of clove dust came back to him and the sound of her voice came back to him one last time.
O I am missing you.
How much he had loved her.
O I am missing you.
Ned Quade, 1832
Two faces. Among the many bubbles, two faces - one scarred with the pox, the round head almost shaven so that its red hairs appear as jagged points over the scalp, like so many rusty needles.
My hair! My red hair!
Ned Quade, the stone man.
Why this curious name? Because upon the triangle where he is flogged for possessing a wad of tobacco, or, once, for singing a song, he betrays no pain. On his first flogging of a hundred lashes I hear the flagellator, a one-time baker called Proctor, say as he unties Ned Quade’s white wrists at the end of the punishment, ‘You are of stone.’ And his back is transformed by the relentless slash of the cat-o’-nine-tails into blood-flecked alabaster. Because in his heart he is innocent and he will not betray his innocence with a single cry of suffering. For that would be an admission that punishment had been felt and was therefore somehow just.
The second face is thin and long, with a scar above the left eye that twists that eye away from the nose, giving the face a distorted appearance. It is topped with medium-length brown hair that is dirty and matted. Aaron Hersey. Dissenting weaver from Spitalfields. One-time Muggletonian, later of the Ancient Deists of Hoxton, he talks of dreams and of having communion with the dead, and regularly sees angels with burning wings and smells the ash of their passing. The angels are beautiful, save for their breath, which he finds most putrid.
The two men sit in a corner of a chilly, fetid stone dormitory, on the floor of which some hundreds of other convicts lie, some moaning in agony, some giggling in madness, some shouting curses in their sleep, some pissing through the gaps in the floorboards upon the Aborigines rounded up from the surrounding wild lands and imprisoned on the floor below. Chill draughts blow through the open slits that serve for windows. From outside, the sound of the gale-whipped waters of Macquarie Harbour slapping the shore of the small island which is their prison. Sarah Island. The Devil’s Island of the British Empire, the endpoint of the vast convict system, the remotest island of the remotest island of the remotest continent. From the blacks incarcerated below, from the throats and mouths of the proud people of the Needwonne and Tarkine, come screams and weeping and terrible coughs and wheezing. They believe the building to be possessed of evil spirits. Some are terrified and some propose escape, and some are dying of influenza and colds and horror, and all believe that devils run around the room and spear them in the chest with evil. From outside, the splatter and surge of the rain carrying off the last of the topsoil from the island that has been totally deforested by the convicts’ slave labour.
Tomorrow Ned Quade and Aaron Hersey are to be part of the gang that is to row up the Gordon River and relieve the Huon pine-cutting gang that has been stationed there for the past two weeks. It is from there that they intend to effect their escape. Ned Quade dictates a note for his wife, who is incarcerated in the Hobart Female Factory, to Aaron Hersey, dissenting weaver from Spital-fields and fellow plotter, who learnt to read and write in various churches.
‘How will it be got to her?’ asks Aaron.
‘Solly. In the commissariat. He owes me. He’ll smuggle it out on the next ship bound for Hobart Town.’ Ned Quade looks around to make sure that none of the other convicts in the barracks are taking any undue interest in their whispered conversation. ‘How should it begin?’ Ned Quade asks Aaron Hersey.
‘However you’d like it to begin,’ replies Aaron. ‘My task is only to capture your words on the paper and speed them to her mind.’
Ned looks at his feet and thinks awhile, then looks up sheepishly at Aaron and says, ‘What if you write “My beloved Eliza”?’
‘That is what you want?’ asks Aaron. Ned says nothing, but nods.
Aaron Hersey writes with a stolen stub of pencil on a sheet of paper that both men hide with the positioning of their bodies. Aaron Hersey writes what he would write if he were to write to a queen. Aaron Hersey writes:
My Esteemed and Most Noble Madame Elijah -
His confidence in the process now boosted by the sight of his words being transformed into a flourishing script upon the paper, Ned Quade continues. ‘Tell her,’ he says, ‘tell her how we are bound for the stockaded town many, many hundreds of miles to the north of Parramatta where all are free and no one is bonded, and that having arrived there and secured work and lodgings, that I will send word and someone to bring her and our children out of bondage into the glorious light of liberty.’
Aaron Hersey writes what he can. Aaron Hersey writes:
Well say You in th. New Jerusalem.
As the flourishes and swirls and loops continue to grow in their grand parade upon the page Ned begins to sense the power that words might have, their subversive possibilities, their seductive strength. ‘Write her,’ he says, ‘that I love her, and only that love has kept me alive till now, God knows there is so little else to nourish a man’s soul in this Hades.’
Aaron Hersey writes what he knows to write as a conclusion. Aaron Hersey writes:
Your loving And humble Servant etc etc in Eyes of The lord
Ned Kwade His Mark
And below this message Ned Quade scrawls the outline of a Celtic cross, a cross enclosed within a circle.
Madonna santa! Just as I want to stay and watch what now happens the cross and the circle begin to dance and swirl before my eyes, begin to form spiralling chains with other white swirls of foam, and then, there, standing above the river’s swirling currents, looking down into the river, I see Aljaz.
the fourth day
In the early morning light, grey and soft and spreading, Aljaz watches the water rise. He stands a little beyond the river’s edge upon a large protruding log, and to the Cockroach glancing down from the campsite above he looks uninterested. But his eyes are everywhere, reading the immediacy of the quickly surfacing, quickly disappearing whirlpools, reading the swirling white patterns of foam washing down from newly formed rapids upriver, hearing the river’s new sounds, seeking to understand what the shushing of the branches of low-lying tea-tree as they throb under the rising, shoving waters foretells. The river seems to be urging the plants and him to come with them downriver, to join the smooth fast madness of a river in rising flood. The tea-trees bend but don’t yield, forever grow with a permanent downriver lean in recognition of the power of the flooded river, but never move from their original position. They grow year in year out, these stunted plants, perhaps a century old, only a metre or so in height, their hunched form bearing physical witness to a hundred floods and a hundred droughts. In the detail of a piece of rushing water Aljaz reads the changing visage of the entire river, hears the terrible soul history of his country, and he is frightened.
He goes back to the campfire and squats down. The others look at him, knowing that he and only he can divine the river and its moods. Aljaz ignores the gaze and looks into the coals of the fire, but he sees only the foam and mist rising from the waterfall at the Churn, feels not the warmth of the flames but the clench of his guts as they push the raft into the big rapid below Thunderush and hope to God that they make it through safely. No one speaks. All wait. Aljaz takes a piece of wood from the heap and goes to make firm a precariously balancing billy. But before he is able to fix it, the Cockroach has kicked a log from the outer of the fire into its centre and deftly repositioned the billy for Aljaz. Then, as he levels the billy, the Cockroach looks around to Aljaz and speaks.
‘What you reckon, Ali?’
Aljaz stands up and brushes his trousers. ‘A good day for cooking,’ says Aljaz, ‘that’s what I reckon.’ And he goes over to a barrel and takes out some flour. ‘Reckon we might start with pancakes, that’s what I reckon.’ Some of the punters are relieved, their own fear arising not from a knowledge of the river, but an intuitive foreboding born of their awareness of their guides’ growing unease. Some read this unease as an opportunity to display their own bravado.
‘I thought that was what the trip was all about,’ says Rickie the doctor. ‘A few thrills.’ He says it slightly uneasily. The Cockroach looks at Rickie.
‘Feel free to take a raft and go,’ says the Cockroach. ‘I might hang back for a pancake myself.’ A few of the group laugh.
Rickie thinks the guides are not going because they think their customers will be scared. ‘I am not scared,’ he says. He says it hesitantly.
Aljaz looks up from the margarine melting in the frypan. ‘I am,’ he says, but then immediately regrets saying it in front of them all.
‘I’ll go a pancake,’ says Otis with a smile. ‘Mum’d cook a truckload of ’em every Sunday lunch.’
They spend all the day in their dripping wet rainforest camp. The men stay in their tents and their sleeping bags as if they existed only to live in them. The women do what the men are always too tired or too uninterested or too caught up in a conversation about sport or politics to be bothered doing. They work. They peel vegetables. They collect firewood. They fetch water from the river up the steep and awkward bank to the campsite. They wash dishes. They help the guides organise the camp, unpacking and packing barrels. Repairing equipment. The men reserve their energies for some future conjectural act of courage. The women’s courage is of a type that endures this day of rain. Meanwhile the men get depressed. The men feel some embarrassment that women are on the same trip and doing things that really only men ought be doing. The guides prefer it. Nothing, for a river guide, is worse than an all-male trip. They are boring and lazy and inclined to foolhardiness. They are considerable work to look after. They are generally not in the same class for company. Aljaz likes sitting down with the women around the fire. The Cockroach organises them into a massed Welsh miners’ choir and makes them sing old Tom Jones songs, to which he seems to know all the words. They sing ‘Delilah’ and they sing ‘The Green Green Grass Of Home’ and they sing ‘Me And Mrs Jones’ and they sing them all badly, says the Cockroach, who claims to be of Welsh extraction.
After lunch the Cockroach and Aljaz unpack and pitch the spare tent, and then try to catch up on some sleep inside it. About mid-afternoon they awaken, unzip the flyscreen and look outside the vestibule. The camp is dark, what little light there is having trouble penetrating the rainforest. Out on the river, which looks lit up in comparison, the rain falls heavily in sheets. But in their dark camp, beneath the dense, interwoven canopy of myrtles and blackwoods and Huon pines, the rain falls lightly, a mizzle interspersed with an occasional drip from a branch. Two punters - Marco, in a bright red Goretex anorak, and Derek, in a damp black japara - stand under the large blue polytarp which is pitched as a fly, under which cooking can take place out of the rain. Derek and Marco talk in low tones.
‘They’re bored,’ says the Cockroach.
‘Get out the monopoly set,’ says Aljaz and they laugh.
‘Fucking punters,’ says the Cockroach.
Dappling the blue polytarp are green and brown myrtle leaves, fallen with the rain. A pool of water has collected in the middle. Marco pushes a paddle up under the pool, sending water rushing down into an open food barrel, drenching the food inside.
‘Fucking idiots,’ says the Cockroach.
Sonja and Harry
Couta Ho called on Maria Magdalena Svevo to hear the latest news about Harry. The talk was of old times, of Aljaz, whom neither had seen for many years, and of Sonja, whom Couta Ho had never met. Maria Magdalena Svevo told Couta Ho the story of how Sonja met Harry in Trieste in 1954. She began the story in a dramatic fashion.
‘On either side of the border, troops were massing. Tito demanded the Slovenian town that the Slovenians called Trst and the Italians called Trieste be returned to Yugoslavia. The Allies refused. For a short time all the tensions of the Cold War built up in a painful boil on the arse of the Adriatic.’ Here her tone returned to the everyday. ‘And who should be selling Japanese sewing machines door to door but Harry Lewis. No one was buying. Post-war Trieste was still finding it hard enough to get money to buy polenta, much less a shonky machine from Asia that promised a lot, cost more, but looked inadequate to its ambitions and was pushed by a foreigner with a strange accent and missing his right thumb.
‘Sonja was working in the café in which Harry, at the end of his second fruitless week of salesmanship, stopped for a coffee. Harry liked the expresso, so unfamiliar and strange to him. For a time he wasn’t aware that it was even coffee, but thought it some exotic foreign beverage.
‘Sonja was intrigued by the dark stranger who carried a sewing machine under his arm, who looked as if he came from the south of Italy, yet walked differently from the peasants streaming up to the north for work. His movements were slow, as if space and time meant something different than it did to everyone around him, something somehow open and bigger.
‘When he came up to the counter to pay, he reached in his pocket and then his face flushed. “Not enough money,” he said in halting Italian. Sonja looked in his dull eyes, but she noticed that they had already fallen to the rack of cakes below.
‘His cheeks were pinched. Sonja knew that hunger had not only a look but a strong odour. Sonja remembered how her mother and her sisters had stunk of hunger during the war. Harry didn’t stink but he did smell pretty bad. She reached into her pocket and slid some money across the glass counter to Harry’s hand. Their fingers touched. Harry looked up into Sonja’s face, perplexed, worried. Sonja smiled, and then laughed. “Which cake, sir?” she asked.
‘Harry ordered four, then, upon examining the money, decided against rashness and ordered two, keeping some change in reserve. He paid for the coffee and the cakes, thanked Sonja profusely and promised to repay her as soon as possible.
‘Sonja became embarrassed, what with the other customers and staff now looking up. She took the correct change out of Harry’s palm and began serving a group of loud GIs. When she next looked up, Harry had gone.
‘Katharina, the manageress, was one of three hundred thousand Italians who had abandoned their homes and villages and memories in Fiume, Istria, and Dalmatia to live in old capitalist Italy, rather than the new socialist Yugoslavia. She had a traditional and hearty contempt for Slovenians that was reinforced by the knowledge that they now lived in her old family home, and this contempt rose like fresh gnocchi in boiling water whenever her temper flared, which was frequently. She stage-whispered to another waitress in Italian, “Stupid vlacuga - as if she’ll ever see him again,” giving particular emphasis to the Slovenian word for whore.
‘Days passed, then a week, then another week. The manageress made jokes about how she should keep all Sonja’s pay, and use it to give coffee and cakes to every dopey half-starved southern Italian who wandered in. Late one afternoon Harry returned. He no longer wore the old threadbare coat. He no longer carried a sewing machine and he no longer smelt of hunger.
‘He walked up to the counter and, in front of the manageress, opened up a wallet bulging with money and gave Sonja a thousand lira. She refused the money but accepted the carnations he had brought. The manageress watched with interest. Harry ordered an expresso and two cakes and when he came to pay, passed an envelope along with the correct change to Sonja.
‘In the envelope were two 500-lira notes, a dried edelweiss, and a note written in bad Italian asking her if she would meet him some evening. He would be in the café at the railway station between seven and nine each evening for the next week.
‘When Sonja read the note by the yellow light of the electric bulb in the grimy toilet of her café, she was not to know that Harry went to the railway café not only for warmth but also because it was an ideal place from which to conduct his new business activities.
‘Not wishing to appear hasty in her interest, Sonja waited four days before deigning to visit the railway station café. At her work she mixed up orders, gave out the wrong change and generally found it difficult to concentrate. The manageress abused her and said it was only because of the manageress’s good heart that she kept Sonja on, stupid and useless Slovene that she was, whereas both Sonja and the manageress knew that Sonja was there because no Italian would work for as low a wage as a Slovene without papers would.
‘On the fourth day Sonja lit the brass petrol stove that her mother had found among the gear of a dead German soldier, put a dented aluminium mug on top and proceeded to melt a cake of soap. When the soap became molten she beat an egg into it using the fork with which she ate and cooked. With the mixture still warm and frothy, she took the dented aluminium mug off the stove. She placed the mug on the floor in the centre of her room, next to a jug of water and an enamel dish that had red roses painted on its side and a blue-edged rim. She knelt in front of the dish and there, with the soap-and-egg mixture and the water, she washed her wiry hair then rinsed it with cider vinegar she had stolen from the café. She filled the basin a second time and washed her body with a coarse pumice stone, then looked at her flesh glowing red from the scouring and the cold. She paused before dressing, and went over to the broken mirror that leant against the plywood wardrobe in the corner.
‘She looked at her reflection with interest, ran her hands round the glory of her pot belly, strong and round, defined on the sides by her hips, and from below by her public hair. She looked at her breasts with their still-girlish nipples, and ran her hands from her breasts down to the small of her back where she rested them, then turned her hands outwards so that her knuckles pressed inwards and her elbows stuck out. She threw her chin back and laughed at what she saw.
‘Il Duce stared back at her from the glass in the guise of a naked woman.
‘“The Slovenian people must realise that they have a destiny only in so far as and for as long as they merge their identity with that of the great Italian people,” she said, imitating the bombastic tones of Mussolini. Then, taking a step back, she lifted her right hand off her buttock and used it to placate an imaginary Roman crowd. “Until they have learnt this fundamental lesson of history, until they understand this fundamental lesson of history, they cannot complain if, because of their own arrogance, they suffer,” she continued. Her left hand rose from her other buttock to join her right hand in quelling the tumultuous applause that greeted this profound announcement. “And until then, and not before then, stupid vlacugi must realise that strange men offered kindness will simply take it and never return.”
‘A knock at the bedroom door. It is Maria Magadalena Svevo with the dress she has borrowed from a friend and just ironed for Sonja.
‘“A man that would lead you to go to so much trouble over yourself can only lead to trouble,” she admonished Sonja. But before she left she sprinkled the inside of the top and the waist of the dress with ground cloves. And cackled, “Fruit is best eaten seasoned.” Never again would Harry be able to eat apple strudel without feeling the most terrible desire.
‘The dress was made of cotton and printed with a floral design. It had two broad shoulder straps, was gathered at the waist, and fell to mid-calf. Sonja tried it on and her small, muscular body slipped easily into the scented fabric. She looked at herself again in the mirror and wiped the brown clove dust off her face with a towel. The dress was a size too big, but standing in front of the mirror, Sonja felt good in it.
‘At the railway café she saw Harry engaged in deep conversation with another, considerably older, man with a large moustache and heavy black bristles. She knew him from the past. She became nervous and decided to leave, but just as she went to depart, Harry spied her and jumped up from his table with a large grin.
‘“Hello,” he said, then faltered, because he still did not know her name. His eyes fell but he quickly recovered, saying, “Harry Lewis. I am so glad you came.” His grin returned.
‘“Hello,” she said. “My name is Sonja Cosini.”
‘The man with black pig bristles stared at Sonja’s breasts and his nostrils twitched. He looked worried. Then he made excuses that he must leave, saying in a somewhat forced manner that he would meet Harry tomorrow at the post office, placing particular emphasis on the final two words. After he had left, both Sonja and Harry relaxed.
‘“Business associate,” said Harry, just in case she should think he may have been a friend.
‘“Sewing machines?” asked Sonja.
‘“No,” laughed Harry, lighting two cigarettes in his mouth and passing one to her. “Well, yes,” he added. For the first time she noticed that he had no thumb on his right hand. Then he said, “Not exactly sewing machines.” And again he grinned. “Actually, I am trying to give them up. Trieste seems as good a place to do it as anywhere.”
‘“Sewing machines?”
‘Harry laughed. “Yeah. Them too.”
‘For a while neither spoke. Then Sonja went to say something just as Harry began to speak. Both stopped, then nervously laughed.
‘“I am not Italian,” Sonja said.
‘“Nor am I.” Harry drew in smoke.
‘“That much was obvious,” said Sonja and she smiled again, nervously, affectionately. “Almost as obvious as your new job.”
‘Harry pulled the cigarette out of his mouth, his smile gone, and looked at her intently. “Is it that obvious?”
‘“My father worked as a smuggler between Austria and Yugoslavia before the war. So I know. But it’s a lot more dangerous now. Now they shoot to kill.”
‘Harry said nothing.
‘“What are you taking over?” she pressed him.
‘Harry looked furtively around, then leaned forward and whispered in her ear.
‘Sonja burst out laughing. “Sewing machines!”
‘Harry looked somewhat aggrieved. “Nobody but nobody has got sewing machines in Yugoslavia. They’re worth a fortune. Drago - that man who was here before - he has the contacts in the Party.” He raised a finger and waggled it at her. “We sell only to the top - generals, high-ranking Party officials - and they pay in American dollars.” He put the cigarette back in his mouth and leaned back. “It’s very safe.”
‘Sonja looked at him and just shook her head, and wished she didn’t feel the desire for him that she did.’
Maria Magadalena Svevo stopped for a moment. Couta Ho raised an objection. ‘The problem with these stories is that they presume there are one or two moments in your life that define what you are for the rest of it. Life’s not like that.’
Maria took the cigar out of her mouth, smacked the grey salmon flesh of her tongue around her lips to moisten them, and said, ‘What if it were?’
‘It’s not. My life doesn’t feel that way anyhow. It feels just the opposite - rushed. Always having to decide this or that. Countless decisions.’
Maria watched the languid rise of the smoke from her near-dead cigar toward the ceiling. ‘What if it is? As I get older and older I think perhaps there is a great truth in such stories. I used to be quite confused about such things. Now I think that maybe the confusion is what we use to not hear the silence. To not see the emptiness.’ Maria Magadalena Svevo paused, but Couta Ho said nothing. Maria Magadalena Svevo decided to tell another story.
‘I knew a young girl once and she fell in love with a young man, a nice young man, from her village. She must have been … well, at least eighteen. And she fell pregnant. And the young man, because he was a good man, said he would do the right thing, as they say, and marry her. And she refused him. They sat together in her bedroom for two days, crying. She said she would not marry him because of the baby, because the baby was the wrong reason to get married. And because he was a good man he countered that he loved her and that he believed in the idea of their marriage. They could not agree on what was to be done, and because they did love one another with all their hearts they ended up crying at their own tragedy. They cried so much that their tears stained the bedspread upon which they sat. Her family listened to the couple crying and wondered what would happen. When they finally came out of the bedroom it was for her to announce that they would not be getting married and that she was going on a short holiday to the nearest town. At the town she had an abortion - by what means I don’t know, because this was a very long time ago, when such things were done in secret. On her return journey home her cart ran off the road into a tree and she was killed. After her death there was a funeral, and a respectful time after the funeral they cleaned out her room in preparation for a boarder. There was not much there, because they were a poor family. The tear-stained bedspread they took off the bed and washed, but the tear stain would not wash out. Try as they might they could not wash the tear stain away. They bleached the bedspread several times, and in the first few years following her death washed it frequently, but none of it made the slightest difference. The tear stain remained. I suppose it troubled them in the end, this bedspread, for they gave it to the young man who had been her lover.’
‘And then what happened?’ asked Couta Ho. ‘To the young man, I mean?’
‘Oh. Nothing. Nothing at all really. He married, many years later. Not a happy marriage, nor an unhappy one. His wife bore him four daughters. And when the eldest turned nineteen he gave her the bedspread and told her this story.’
‘And then?’
‘Then nothing.’ Maria pulled a cigar out of the double-headed eagle box and tapped the double-headed eagle on one of its two beaks with the cigar end.
‘Es ist passiert,’ she said ruefully. Her head was bowed, and just for a moment, though only for a moment, Couta Ho thought the craggy old voice quavered. ‘It just happened like that, that’s what the old Austrians used say. Es ist passiert.’ She stopped again, as if her thoughts were interrupting her speech. Then, as abruptly as she had halted, she recommenced talking. ‘Now the daughter sleeps under that bedspread every night, and as she falls asleep she looks at that stain and wonders about the strangeness of life and what she would be, if anything, if her father’s lover had not made that fateful decision.’
Maria looked at her cigar for some time, as if minutely examining it for flaws. Then she lighted it, inhaled and, holding her breath, spoke in a husky voice. ‘Would you like to see it?’ she asked Couta Ho. She swallowed spittle. Then exhaled a dragon breath of smoke.
the fifth day
The smoke fills my vision. When it finally clears I see the punters gathered round the fire site and Rickie the doctor making a few desultory efforts to get the fire going. It is a dismal affair, for after so much rain even the wood under the fly is wet. The fire in consequence spits and hisses and steams and smokes as a thin slink of flame slides in and out of the wet sticks, as if searching for one that will burn. It is breakfast. The morning comes slowly, the light weak and oppressive, the black clouds, though no longer emptying torrential rain, still there, making the bluey-black sky look as though an ink bottle has fallen upon it.
The Cockroach looks at the menu, a typed sheet in a clear plastic envelope, to see what they are meant to be eating on day five. The Cockroach doesn’t bother with the fire, but instead cranks up two petrol stoves and puts a billy of water on each; one for coffee, one for porridge. As the stoves busily rumble with the rapid pulsation of the petrol vaporising I can see Aljaz walking down out of the rainforest and onto the riverbank. I watch him stretch and yawn; his body, dry and warm from a night’s rest in his sleeping bag, now at odds with the cold and damp.
He checks the stick he put in the bank as a water gauge the evening before. The river’s edge ebbs and rises in minuscule waves and he spends some time watching, making sure that his reading is correct. The river is up perhaps ten centimetres on its level of the previous evening. Compared to the five metres it rose over the previous day, it is a marginal increase. Aljaz goes and fetches the Cockroach. They both go back down to the river and look at the gauge. They wonder whether they should try and go through the gorge or stay put. They look at the clouds and try and guess what the weather will do. If they stay put for a second day they will fall further behind schedule. The lost time is not impossible to make up by any means, but it will be hard to rendezvous with the seaplane at the pickup point on the Gordon River. But if the river continues to rise then the gorge will become far too dangerous and they must simply wait, no matter how frustrating it is for the punters, who are already thoroughly sick of seeing their precious vacation days drift away with the rushing flood waters.
‘Should we wait one more day?’ asks the Cockroach. Aljaz looks around, surprised that the Cockroach shares his thoughts. The Cockroach laughs his easygoing laugh, his buck teeth protruding. ‘Ah, well. The gods will punish us if we don’t wait long enough,’ he says. It is a joke and his buck teeth protrude again. The Cockroach notices something. He leans down, squints, and then points at the gauge stick. The river has started to drop, albeit slightly. And at the very moment of the Cockroach’s discovery, a single shaft of light cuts through the gloom and illuminates the two river guides as if it were a spotlight. They look up toward the heavens and see that the clouds have parted and some blue sky has appeared. Their decision seems to have been made for them by an ethereal force. ‘Into the gorge on a falling river,’ laughs the Cockroach. The two river guides turn and start heading back up into their rainforest camp. ‘The angels have ordered us,’ says the Cockroach.
When they get back they find that the porridge has burnt. Derek the accountant apologises. ‘I stirred her twice,’ he says by way of inadequate explanation, ‘but I wanted to pack up my sleeping bag.’ The Cockroach rolls his eyes, tells Derek he’s a moron, and says that he’ll make the coffee. He makes it extra strong and black, and the grounds fill Aljaz’s mouth. As he sips from his chipped green enamel mug, Aljaz squats on the ground. His guts rumble as the thick black coffee mixes with the fears in the pit of his stomach. His bowels feel unusually heavy. The punters gather round the two river guides like animals around a corpse. They sense that a decision has been made, but no one asks. They murmur in low tones to each other about their digestion or their night’s sleep and the little tricks they have deployed to make sure they rest better.
‘I roll up my clothes and put them in my sleeping bag cover and make a pillow of them,’ says Sheena.
‘I dig a little hole for my hip,’ says Rickie.
‘I sleep in my wet socks and they dry in my sleeping bag from my body heat,’ says Derek.
‘I light up me farts and that keeps me warm of a night,’ says Otis. The others look around at the big boy-man. Watch his face slowly turn up into a smile. ‘Itsa a joke.’ Aljaz smiles. The Cockroach laughs. The others follow.
Aljaz stands up and stretches, rubs his hands over his stubbly cheeks, pulls his Fitzroy beanie off and runs a hand through his thin greasy hair, then pulls the beanie back on. When the laughter dies down, he speaks. ‘If I could just have everyone’s attention for a minute.’ The low murmuring dies away. ‘Normally we don’t set off into the gorge at this sort of level. But as you can feel, the air is warmer than it was yesterday and the rain has stopped. That warm air means the weather has changed round to northerly. That means it should be clear skies for at least the next few days. The river has started to fall and I think with this sort of good weather it will fall real quick through the day.’
Aljaz looks around at the punters, takes one last swig from his enamel mug, then throws the remnant coffee grounds on the fire. ‘The Cockroach and I feel that we would be safe going through the gorge and that maybe we ought give it a crack today. If we do decide to go, we’ll only be going as far as the Coruscades today, where we camp at the top of the second major portage. Tomorrow we would go through the rest of the gorge.’ Aljaz’s statement is greeted with a general murmur of approval. The punters are as sick of waiting around in their tents as Aljaz and the Cockroach.
‘So we’re going or what?’ asks Marco.
‘We’re going,’ says the Cockroach. ‘Into Deception.’
Harry
I watch Aljaz go to say something but I can’t hear what it is. I see Sheena shake her head. I see Rickie begin to move off toward the thunderbox but then he too is lost to my sight as the whole scene fades away. My mind is in any case already elsewhere. I am wondering not about what will happen to them on the river, for I know all too well what fate awaits them. But it’s what I don’t know that I wish to see. And I want to know how the hell Harry came to be in Trieste in 1954. I mean, it was so out of character for him. After returning to Tasmania with Sonja and me all those years ago he never left the island again, as though Tasmania were a world total and full in itself. Which for him it possibly was. And he never ceased to find wonders within it, new and marvellous for both him and everyone he shared them with. Even as his drinking slowly dulled his mind and dimmed his spirit, as though his body were a lamp and his soul the diminishing fuel, even as his heart guttered in the torrent of drink daily falling upon it, he still found time to express wonder, be it at his bizarre barbeques, or be it in his occasional forays into the bush, fishing and hunting.
I remember the way he used smile. How he would bow his head slightly, as if a little embarrassed. How the corners of his mouth would curl slightly upwards. I remember these things now in the hope of exercising some control over this capricious river of visions, in the hope that it might show me why my father ended up in Trieste. The river, as ever, does not explain. But it does show me some things I never knew.
A vision at first most mysterious comes to me.
The crossroads. Night-time. Sky black. A man in raindarkened trousers and an ancient black bluey coat. Once his father’s bluey coat. Now worn and old. And, in the incessant rain, wet and cold. It wasn’t meant to turn out like this, I can see him thinking as he pulls the steaming damp collar of the bluey up around his face. It shouldn’t have ended like this. Black lapels pulled hard against wet cheeks, ruddy with chill through the small white clouds of his breath that envelop his face.
Whose cheeks? I look harder, closer into the river, scan its fleeing waters intently. And finally I recognise them.
Harry’s cheeks. Harry’s face, empty of anything save his ongoing belief in fate determining everything and him having no control. Too many deaths and none expected. Him meant for the mincer and surviving and Old Bo not. Auntie Ellie not. Daisy not. Boy not. Rose not. Him meant for the mincer and surviving. But a thumbless man is a man unable to chop and saw and he has to leave his beloved rivers and head wherever work might be had. He travels up to Queenstown from Strahan that morning on the ore train’s return run, hoping to pull some work suitable for a one-thumbed man in a pub or bank or store well before evening. But all the employers either publicly said they were right for men, or, thought Harry, were wrong in their private suspicions that a lone-thumbed man was not to be trusted.
Wind blowing hard, howling in the lonesome telegraph wires wet with rain and humming with the desire of people to somehow touch one another, no matter how far away. No matter, thinks Harry. He trudges out of town to the gravel crossroads, hopeful of thumbing a lift with his left hand to the next mining town up the coast, Rosebery, where a cousin tends bar in the bottom pub and might be prevailed upon for an evening’s accommodation on his floor and some introductions to places of work in the morning.
He watches the few cars all chug past him without stopping. He had hoped to be in Rosebery in time for tea. And now it is late and he is wet and cold and hungry. In the end a truck heading in the opposite direction stops, an ancient old Dodge driven by a fisherman, name of Reggie Ho, whose boat is stuck in at Strahan because of a big blow-up in the Indian Ocean. Reggie Ho has been drinking and tonight he is going all the way through to Hobart, though not to see his family, who lives there, but to see a girlfriend. Hobart. Eight long hours heading east over the wild unsealed road that snakes its way around mountain passes and along the top of ravines to the other side of the island. Hobart. The big smoke. The opposite direction to where Harry wishes to travel. It’s not where Harry is going or has ever thought of going. No matter. Even though until that moment he has never thought of going anywhere near the city, Harry accepts the lift because that is his fate, that’s how the dice have fallen. Reggie Ho drives the truck hard down that treacherous lonely windy gravelly track and Harry sits and slides in the cold wet seat, shielding himself from the rain that drips into the cabin as best he can.
They arrive in Hobart clammy-cold well past midnight and Reggie Ho takes Harry to Ma Dwyer’s Blue House for a warming drink. There, amidst the steaming wharfies and smoking fishermen and smouldering cops and fuming politicians and numerous bored women who work there, he sights a familiar figure playing the Wertheimer piano. Half drunk or entirely drunk, it’s hard to tell, but he’s still dapper in his Bidencopes finest, still the elegant professional continuing to play throughout a spirited altercation between a very drunk Scot sailor and a very aggressive local wharfie, that ends up with the wharfie flying into the piano and sending sheet music everywhere. Blood spurts, drinks fall, glass smashes, cries and screams abound. And Ruth just puts his English tailor-made cigarette, flash filter and all, into the ash tray, admittedly with a shaky hand, pushes his red silk cravat back into its proper position beneath his Harris tweed jacket, and gives a crooked smile of thanks to one of the ladies who picks up the sheets of music from the floor and hastily rearranges them on the piano. Ruth dreamingly keeps right on playing, too far gone to recognise that he is now doing two songs simultaneously, playing the bottom half of ‘I’m Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter’ and the top half of ‘Drinking Rum And Coca Cola’. Too snakes-hissed to notice the difference, or perhaps wrongly attributing it to what he regards as the corrupting and decadent influence of the new musical fashions, but not so far gone that he is unable to recognise his nephew. Ruth’s jowly old face sparks with recognition. ‘Hi-ho, Harry,’ he says, his slurred voice somehow managing to syncopate with the unique melody emerging from the chest of the Wertheimer upright. ‘Well, hi-ho. Long time no see.’ Harry starts to tell Ruth his story, but their conversation is cut short by Ma, who storms up to the piano cranky as a cut snake and says, ‘Jeezuz, Ruth! There won’t be a single bloke left if you play any more of that Yankee bebop shit.’ Ma starts humming ‘The Kellys, Jo Byrne And Dan Hart’. Ruth looks back down at the sheet music and manages to focus long enough to recognise his grievous error. Without saying anything, he bursts into an Al Bowlly song. Ma smiles. ‘You not too far gone not to remember a few of the good old tunes, eh Ruth? You remember, don’t ya Ruth?’ Ruth winks his assent to Ma, who for a moment looks forlornly into the distance, but only a moment, for she spots Harry and Reggie Ho.
‘Who the hell are youse?’ she asks.
Ruth introduces Harry to Ma and tells Ma of Harry’s plight. Ma wanders off, then returns with a Dutchman who skippers a tramp steamer that carts apples to Europe. The skipper takes Harry into Ma’s smoko room out the back of the pub and looks suspiciously at his right hand with its flap for a thumb. He says nothing. He turns his back, goes to the cupboard, opens it, searches around, then turns and without warning throws an egg at Harry. Harry catches it in the cup of the four fingers of his right hand.
‘Okay,’ says the Dutch skipper, whose name is Gerry and whose speech is idiosyncratic Euro-Hollywood. ‘Okay. I owe a few of the greenbacks to the Ma for eating candy in the candy store, so okay. Hell, why nit, eh? Here to Naples. That’s the racket. You cook and wash. Ja? Hell, let’s do it, buddy. Okay? Why nit? Ain’t this life one hell of a big crapshoot?’
Ain’t it just, thinks Harry, ain’t it just, whatever the bugger a crapshoot might be. No matter. Harry believes in fate, in somebody having his number up there and there not being a dam thing he can do about it. So even though he has never harboured any desire to travel, a job’s a job, and he accepts with equanimity the prospect of steaming out of Hobart the following morning to a place that may as well be the moon for all it means to him.
Harry looks at the Dutchman dressed in his best suit of white cotton. A dapper man. A travelled man. Harry thought of travelling as something you did with the army if you were unlucky enough to be caught up in a war. But he had been without a job too long and any job was better than being on the dole. Now he was a little drunk and he wanted to wake up tomorrow and know that he was going somewhere, rather than drifting. Harry proffered his thumbless hand to shake his acceptance.
‘What part of England is Naples in?’ Harry asked as they shook hands.
A gambler is almost always a fatalist, because they accept both the good and bad throw of the dice as equally inevitable, and believe there is nothing they could have done to avoid that fall of the dice. If Auntie Ellie hadn’t been such a powerful anti-gambler Harry could have ended up with a terrible problem with the dogs and the nags, because he would have lost and lost and simply thought that it was fate and that there wasn’t a dam thing he could do about it. But Auntie Ellie had indoctrinated such a fear of gambling in his heart, he found even buying a lottery ticket mildly sinful. Harry, however, was a gambler with life. Which is, I suppose, why he ended up in Trieste.
Upon arriving at Naples some months later, after a hellish and gruelling trip, he is there abandoned by Gerry, who takes on a load of illegal refugees whom he can pay even less to crew the boat. Harry accepts the offer of an ex-GI called Hank. Hank looks like an emaciated Clark Gable and talks like Mickey Rooney. He has a burnt-out pension full of Japanese sewing machines he has got through a deal with a buddy, who is part of the occupation forces in Japan. Harry knows nothing about sewing machines, nor about Italy, nor can he speak Italian, but he does, according to Hank, have a winning smile. And winning, says Hank, is everything. ‘I don’t like losers,’ says Hank. ‘Are you a loser, Harry?’ The expression ‘loser’ is as new to Harry as the concept. He pauses, a little unsure as to what to say. His entire world had shaped itself around the song of loss.
‘I am not sure I’ve got anything left to lose,’ he says after a time. Hank smiles and slaps him on the back.
Harry had never thought of being a salesman. He had seen the travellers who stayed overnight at Hamers with their cheap suits and soft hands. He had no desire of ever joining their ranks but he had no work, and this, after a fashion, was an offer of work. And whether it be good or bad, Harry believes that this is the job intended for him, and in the end there is for Harry no decison to make. The deal is simple. With his payout from the boat, Harry buys twenty sewing machines and secures an option on twenty more. ‘Where do I start?’ asks Harry.
‘South of the city,’ says Hank, eager to rid central Naples of any potential rival, even one as self-evidently witless as Harry.
I can’t bear to watch this any more. If it were a movie on TV I’d hide behind the couch or go and make a coffee, because this fatalism is just so bloody irritating. Maybe because it reminds me so much of myself. I dunno. But how can someone be so resigned to whatever happens? This is my father I’m seeing, for crying out loud, not a frigging jellyfish. I should be able to do something, get him that job at the Empire Hotel, help him in some way. It just seems too unfair to watch people’s lives like this and not be able to do anything. I try and summon another vision, but as I try and obliterate this helpless Harry from view I hear him say something entirely unexpected. He says one word. He says, ‘Trieste.’
‘Trieste?’ says Hank, shocked. ‘What the hell ya mean, Trieste?’
In the kitchen of the tramp steamer there had been a wall of postcards from around the world. One in particular had taken Harry’s fancy. It looked somehow familiar. With its houses clustering on hills, and its harbour, it looked a bit like Hobart. ‘What is this?’ he asked Gerry one day. ‘Trieste,’ said Gerry. ‘Full of weird guys and weirder dames. Slovenes and Croats and Krauts and wops. Nit a nice place. One hell of a jive-jointing dump for a continent but what the hell, eh?’
What the hell. Something was born in the mind of Harry Lewis as he looked at that curling postcard, something that went beyond his normal acquiescence to the river of events and was to lead him to my mother and to the matter - the no small matter, as far as I am concerned - of my conception.
‘Trieste,’ repeats Harry. ‘That’s where I’m going with my sewing machines.’
Hank pauses, then shrugs his shoulders. ‘Have it your way, buddy,’ he says. ‘That’s the wonderful freedom of capitalism.’
Harry smiles at Hank.
I remember the way he used smile. But this smile was somehow different, as though for once he had actually done something he wanted to do.
Couta Ho, 1993
I am ready to absorb the details of Harry’s trip north, to watch his adventures and seek to understand his responses - sometimes stunned, sometimes bemused, often delighted - to the strange land he found himself in. I want to observe how others saw this curious one-thumbed stranger. But I am not going with Harry. As much as I want to, try as I might, I am not going with him. I am already far, far away from Italy in that faraway time, dropping down into a city, into a street, over a laundromat, across the road and into an overgrown garden, the shapes of which are beginning to be lost in the dimming light of late afternoon. Facing the garden a sitting-room window illuminated by an unshaded electric light. Within the sitting-room, beneath the electric light, sit Couta Ho and Maria Magdalena Svevo.
I can see them, but they can’t see me. Maybe that is why I suddenly flail my fists out at them both, like I sometimes used to throw a few punches out late at night in pubs here and there. Years ago now, let it be added. So that someone would notice me and say, Brother, you are part of this world and we do care about you and what you think and feel, and your thoughts and emotions do matter; you are not nothing. But of course no one ever said such things. They either snotted me or I snotted them, or more often than not we both succeeded only in snotting each other with no clear winner or loser. Whatever, the result was always the same. People laughed and jeered and drank on regardless. Because the people I was hitting were as invisible as me. Because we were all phantoms who had lost something central and we roamed the earth like haunted spirits trying to find that something, and we all ended up lying on the pavement outside, trying to staunch the blood running out of our mouths and eyes with our ragged sleeves. I brawled more when I was younger, when I thought it would somehow render me solid and whole. But I think it would be a good five years since I last blued, because I’ve lost even the hopeless ambition of forming a tunnel to the real world with my rolling fists. But at this moment something within me snaps, and I cannot help but throw a few blows at Maria Magdalena Svevo and Couta Ho. Of course nothing happens. Thankfully, nothing happens. My blows simply pass through their heads, my fists and arms only a violent intention without substance.
‘I better be getting on,’ I hear Maria Magdalena Svevo say as my body shrieks in agony from the sudden wild movement of my arms. Maria Magdalena Svevo stands up and walks over to a framed photo that hangs from the wall. It shows a small baby girl. ‘She was a lovely little baby,’ she says.
‘Jemma was beautiful,’ replies Couta Ho, ‘but you know the funny thing is …’ Couta Ho’s voice begins to quaver. She goes to halt it, to stop it, to push it all back down, but then she stops, lowers her heads, pulls out a handkerchief, and when she looks back her eyes are streaming with tears and she just keeps on going as if they are normal, without embarrassment. I can see that Maria Magdalena Svevo thinks there is something beautiful about this, but she cannot name what it is. Perhaps she feels that it is a moment of honesty and trust and that perhaps there are not very many moments such as this in a person’s life. She continues to stand.
Couta Ho keeps on talking.
‘After a while after Jemma died, Aljaz came to think that I was too obsessed about it all. He said I needed to get my mind back on other things and stop being morbid. He meant well. I suppose that was how he coped with things. He trained harder, ran for miles and miles every night. He didn’t think it did to dwell upon such things. “Why can’t you be normal?” he’d ask. “Why can’t you just be normal like everybody else?” “Because we’re not normal,” I’d say. “Because this thing has changed us and nothing is normal any more.” “The baby’s dead,” he’d shout. “Dead, don’t you understand.” And I’d scream and cry and say, “Maybe Jemma is dead, but she’s not gone, she’ll never go, whether you want her to or not. She’s part of us, whether you want her here or not.” Silly things like that, I’d say. Silly things. But that’s what I thought. It was then that Ali suggested I should take some classes of an evening to give me something other than the baby to think about. Ali always liked activity. “An active body is a healthy mind,” he’d say. Jesus, can you believe it? He got into triathalons as well as his football, and he was always trying to do as many things as possible. Like his baby has just died, but it’s as if - if he can just wear out enough Reebok rubber, if he can just make his knees hurt more than what he hurts inside, then it’ll be okay. “There’s just not enough hours in the day,” he’d always say. But for me there were too many, hours that just had to be endured.’
Couta Ho looks up and realises that Maria Magdalena Svevo is still standing up. ‘I’m sorry, Maria,’ she says.
‘Don’t be sorry,’ says Maria Magdalena Svevo. ‘Nothing to be sorry about.’
Couta Ho apologises, says she will stop talking, and asks Maria Magdalena Svevo to sit down while she gathers herself.
‘Don’t stop talking,’ says Maria Magdalena Svevo. ‘Unless you want to.’ So Couta Ho continues.
‘Everyday I’d go to the cemetery to see Jemma’s grave. She’s buried down Kingston, in that modern cemetery down there where they don’t have headstones, only plaques that sit in the lawn in neat rows, and everyone has to have the same size plaque. They bury all the babies together, in the same row. I don’t know why, they just do. Some people try to make their plaque look a bit different from the others in the row by leaving some of their baby’s favourite toys. It breaks you up to see that, you know, just these rows of babies’ plaques, every second or third one with a little plastic doll or toy, just simple things like that, a Big Bird toy or a toy car or a teddy bear or that sort of thing, out there in the rain and cold and no one to pick them up and play with them and hold them …’
Couta Ho’s voice trails off and she looks away, out of the window of her home, past her front garden to the laundromat across the road, the lights of which have just come on. She realises that it is almost entirely dark in the room and gets up and draws the curtains and switches on the light. As Couta Ho moves around her, Maria Magdalena Svevo speaks because she feels she ought, not because she wishes to.
‘It must have been very hard,’ she says, and immediately it is obvious that she hates herself for trying to put any gloss on what this woman feels.
‘Hard?’ asks Couta, sitting back down, feeling this small word in her throat. ‘Yes,’ she says, considering it, lending some dignity to Maria Magdalena Svevo’s comment, as if one inadequate word is about as good as any other inadequate word. ‘Yes, it was hard.’ But the idea of hard is too small, the word ‘hard’ too insignificant to begin to approach what Couta carries within her. The closest approximation she can give to what she feels is her story, and Maria Magdalena Svevo realises she has interrupted that story and that she was wrong to do so. ‘Hard,’ says Couta, ‘you could say that.’ And then her gaze returns to the green laminex table top and she sees that their mugs are empty. ‘Another cuppa?’ asks Couta.
In the kitchen Maria Magdalena Svevo hears the tap running, hears the old chipped blue porcelain jug filling, the jug being plugged in, the snap of the power point being switched on. The electricity zaps and sparks in the loose fitting in the old jug, and then the fizzing gives way as the element begins to rumble deep down. And Couta resumes her story, her voice now tired and distant.
‘Aljaz said I was to stop going to the cemetery except on the anniversary of her death. I thought, Maybe Ali is right. Maybe I do think about Jemma too much. Maybe I was sick. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. It didn’t really matter to me what I did. If it made Ali feel better about things then I was happy enough to do it. I enrolled in a wool-spinning class. But the first night when I got in the car I just drove straight through the city and there I was, back at the cemetery. That’s how it started. Each Tuesday night. Out I’d go and I would feel sort of happy, and Ali was happy that I was happy. And I was happy because I was going to see Jemma and Ali was smiling.’
‘So you never went to any of the wool-spinning classes?’ Maria Magdalena Svevo asks.
‘No,’ replies Couta over the sound of water being poured into mugs. ‘It just gave me time to go down to the cemetery to see Jemma.’
And Couta Ho laughs at her small deception. She stands at the table holding a mug of instant coffee out to Maria Magdalena Svevo with her left hand, while she cradles her own close to her chest. She raises the mug to her lips - those small, soft undecorated lips - has a sip and continues a little smile at the memory of it all.
‘Didn’t you worry that Aljaz might twig to what was going on?’ asks Maria Magdalena Svevo.
Couta places her coffee on the table, sits down, and entwines her hands in the mug’s handle. They face one another across the table, but neither looks at the other, just at the table’s surface, at the swirls in the coffee, at the stains and crumbs on the table.
‘Well, I did,’ says Couta after a time. ‘Yes, I did.’ She takes a sip of her coffee but as she does so she keeps her hands tightly clasped around the mug, as if she is in the midst of a blizzard and the hot mug is her only source of warmth. She puts the cup down but her hands stay tightly wrapped around it. ‘I worried that if he found out he would be furious. The wool-spinning course went for twelve weeks and by the end of it I was getting worried that Ali would work out what was going on. So I went to a shop and brought two lovely hand-knitted jumpers made out of home-spun wool, one for Ali and one for Jemma. They cost a small fortune, but money hasn’t really meant a lot since - since back then. Anyway, I got the right size for Jemma, because she would be two come the next month, and the lady in the shop said a two-year-old would get a good twelve months’ wear out of it before it became too small. I got home that Tuesday night and gave Ali his jumper. He was thrilled. “I told you,” he said. “See how it has helped to get things back in perspective?”’
Maria Magdalena Svevo laughs. ‘He never realised?’
Couta begins to laugh too at the absurdity of it. ‘I know,’ she says. She laughs some more. ‘It is funny. Now. Looking back on it, it is funny.’ Couta seems mildly shocked at the thought of any humour coming out of that time, and the idea of any of it being funny amuses her as much as the joke itself. ‘It is funny, isn’t it? I mean, I’d forgotten - this is true, I swear it, you won’t believe this - I’d forgotten to cut the tag off the inside of the neck. So there he is, pulling it on, and I saw it and I thought, Oh my god, what is going to happen now? But he never noticed a thing. I cut it out the next day, before he got home from work. He seemed so happy with his jumper and he told me about his plans for us to go on a holiday to Queensland the next summer. I said it all sounded wonderful and we sat up in bed for ages talking about what we would do on holiday. Then he started to kiss me on the back and wanted to make love. I didn’t care because I couldn’t feel anything, anything good or bad. I just lay there, still, and thought of the moon. That’s how I felt, big and empty like the moon, like nothing could hurt me any more.’ Couta looked up at Maria Magdalena Svevo. ‘Funny that I am telling you such private things. Because before, I would never have dreamt of talking to other people about such things. You remember what I was like. But now, what does it matter? If people know nothing or if they know everything, what does it matter? All I know is that Jemma was here and now she isn’t.’ Couta rested her cheek on one hand, looked down at her mug and swilled the remaining coffee around with her other hand. ‘Anyway, I think Ali was a bit disappointed. He didn’t say anything, but, well, you know how those things are.
‘The next morning after he had gone to work, I drove down to the cemetery and put Jemma’s jumper on her grave so that she would have it. I folded it neatly, the way it was in the shop when I bought it. I remember where I left it. It was on the top left-hand corner of the plaque. Funny, the things you remember. I remember the jumper, where I put it, how I folded it, but I don’t remember Jemma. I mean, I do remember her, but not how she looked, how she moved, how she cried and smiled, how her hands moved, those sorts of little things. That was all gone. I’d look at our photos, but when I closed my eyes all I could see was the photos, not Jemma, not outside the photos. I’d try and try but it was like it was all gone. Except once. The night after I took the jumper to her grave.
‘That night I slept real well, the first time I had slept properly since Jemma died, and I dreamt Jemma had grown into a little girl and she was this beautiful two-year-old running around the park in that jumper - and it did fit beautifully, like I knew it would. She ran into my arms and I could hear her laugh and I could feel her little body hot from running, and she said to me, ‘I love you, Mummy.’ And I said, ‘Now, make sure you don’t get your new jumper dirty.’ Couta laughs again and then her mouth draws up and her cheeks draw in and her mouth goes to open but no words come out; nothing comes out except some choked sobs.
Maria Magdalena Svevo takes Couta’s hand. ‘That’s a good dream,’ she says.
‘Is it?’ asks Couta and she withdraws her hand slowly. ‘I don’t know. I read this book once and in it - I’ve always remembered this, I don’t know why - one character says how it’s the dead people who won’t let you go. That’s true, isn’t it? I’ve always remembered that. It’s the dead who won’t let you go. Anyway. I … I never went back after that.
‘It was not long after that we broke up. There was no real reason, but it was like the thing that had held us together had snapped. Do you know what I mean? It was like it was broken and nothing could fix it.’
Couta looks Maria Magdalena Svevo in the eyes for the first time that day. Couta’s face is confused. She is obviously at a loss to explain the final part of her story.
‘But the funny thing was, he never knew it was broken until I told him. That is a funny thing.’
And she looks back down into her coffee cup, at the way the electric light above is reflected in its small blackness. ‘Isn’t it?’
Maria Magdalena Svevo looks on and says nothing. Then she reaches down into a plastic shopping bag she has brought with her. The plastic scriffles as she delves within to finally pull out a parcel wrapped in brown paper and baling twine. Maria Magdalena Svevo places the parcel upon the table.
Maria Magdalena Svevo unties the twine and spreads out the brown paper. There, neatly folded and covered in a scattering of clove dust, is the tear-stained bedspread. Maria Magdalena Svevo puts her hands beneath the bedspread, lifts it up, and proffers it to Couta Ho.
Saying: ‘If two lie together, then they have heat, but how can one be warm alone?’