8

THE ARCHAEOLOGISTS

Sarah’s bar, The Alderman, is full.

‘Attempted rape and possible murder are good for business,’ she whispers to me, walking by to stoke her wood fire, with small logs under her arm.

It’s 8 pm. You can still feel the dusk in the air, though it’s already dark. People smell of fresh showers and newly applied make-up. The night is almost a darker day, a new beginning, back to front: faces resting from pursuing something, men’s jaws loosened and women smiling understandingly. It’s been a week now since our Merri Creek promenade. We’ve given the two men’s descriptions to the police. They think we’ve had a close call. The idea of jumping in the water has put everyone in stitches, but the police, surprisingly, are the only ones not to laugh. It seems that it’s often a small thing that will make the difference between life and death in an attack of that kind.

‘It’s luck, of course, but it’s also about not giving in – in your mind – at any moment,’ an inspector tells us.

‘Drenched women, unparalysed by their fear, are a different kettle of fish to stunned victims. Unless,’ he adds with a smile, ‘these guys had a catlike fear of water.’

Maybe Jack is looking at big cats at this minute. Feeding them, even going into their cages. I wonder how he manages without music. There are so many questions my imagination stumbles on, a bit like a Magritte painting, with doors opening into nowhere, or into a sky of terribly ordered clouds. And there is always a man in a bowler hat. He waits there like a clown in a suit, without a circus. And I feel exactly like him.

It’s nice to sit at The Alderman now I know Sarah. Even if she is too busy even to wink at me, I can be the Magritte man in peace, without feeling like a sore thumb. Here I’m safe to read and to remember other beers, and other conversations, on the other side of the planet. The stool morphs into a strangely comfortable seat, carrying me through the landscape of my book. As a child I used to daydream about the peas on my plate. If you observe them long enough they become mysterious. Each one has its own distinct personality. You get to like them individually, and so I swallowed them whole to keep them alive inside me. Reading is the same. The characters settle inside you like peas – whole and alive.

When you’re not feeling so hot, characters in books are preferable to real people, who always seem to lead you back to the one person you shouldn’t be thinking about. We’re all in the same boats of misunderstanding and haphazard wisdom, inexorably rowing towards each other. Albert Cossery’s novel Proud Beggars pops into my mind. Thank the gods for that. Two beggars are friends. But one of them wants to commit suicide. His companion begs him not to. The candidate for suicide explains he could just as well be travelling in some distant country. His friend protests that in that case it would still be possible to imagine him walking in the sunshine, or savouring some wine in some shady café. But if he is dead, what can he imagine? Not his happiness, nor the breath coming through his lungs, nor the smile on his face, nor the coffee warming his belly – what torture. Every time I think of that story, it comforts me.

Jack is alive. He may be patting a giraffe, gently closing a gorilla’s cage, offering his finger to some parrots to nibble. I imagine his breath clouding on a cold winter day, his tousled head in the morning. I see his neck and the quirky growth line of his hair behind his collar, as if someone had planted it while humming a tune. I see his kind eyes and his slow walk, as if his every step were there on purpose, for him to put here, on this Australian earth, where his parents and grandparents were born. I remember the shape of his hands and fingers and nails. I see his feet. He may have lost his memory, but he is alive – he is treading the same earth as me.

Even thinking of books doesn’t always work.

The bar noises stop swimming around me. Bernice is tapping her index finger on my shoulder.

‘I thought you’d be here.’

Then her ten soft fingers land on my forearm.

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

With a severe expression on her face, she drinks deep before speaking.

‘Because, I know. Things hurt after. On the spot they just splash at you, don’t they?’

I smile at her.

‘They did splash.’

She shakes her head, until her fringe bounces.

‘When my husband left me, I was in shock, it didn’t sink in, but for weeks, and now, for months, it’s as if he’s leaving me over and over again. So, you see, I know.’

Her words reverberate in the air of the bar – where they seem to shiver. Every time we miss the opportunity of consolation, we should make a knot in our handkerchief. But I don’t have time, Bernice is already clearing her throat.

‘Anyway, I’m sure you’re both suffering from post-traumatic stress.’

Sarah casts me one of her quiet glances and I feel the creek again – icy, reassuring against my legs.

Bernice puts her beer down.

‘The first time we met was right here, wasn’t it? Maybe we’re sitting in the exact same places tonight, on the exact same stools, who knows?’

I try to change her mood.

‘Maybe it’s the exact same minute too.’

Bernice frowns at her watch and I look at the clock on the wall as if it were a doorway.

‘Maybe it is.’

Bernice waves her hand:

‘I won’t drink Pimm’s Nº 1 anymore. It’s treacherous.’

I feel a smile taking over my face. I can understand why people like listening to her program. Things are put back where they belong – the waves in the sea, the clouds in the sky – they stop slipping and sliding all over the place. Some of us have that talent – a bit like Atlas holding the earth on his shoulders, except that Bernice would probably hold the world in a Silver Cross perambulator.

Even though her show on Triple R is doing well, all she can think about is her phantom child. The fact that it could be a he or a she is her main conundrum. She isn’t talking of prams now, but more about forms, and appointments with psychologists, who are checking to see if she is suitable.

‘The things they ask you,’ she sighs.

‘Do you go to the pub? No, I do not go to the pub. They didn’t ask me if I go to bars.’

Her forehead puckers.

‘That wasn’t a lie, was it? By omission, I mean.’

Before I can answer, she answers herself under her breath.

‘Maybe it is …’

Then her tone perks up.

‘As for pubs, I never go to pubs. The other night was an exception – it was a work function.’

She then returns to post-traumatic stress.

‘You know, you should both be going to see someone. I bet you have nightmares. Even being burgled is a shock to the system. People get depressed over losing their television, let alone having a knife flashed at them by an icy creek.’

Bernice often prepares herself for the worst, a bit like a sign I saw once in a fire station: Imagine Hell and Get Ready.

Sarah, serving customers, glances over. That water has made us closer. We suddenly seem to have acquired some kind of bond neither of us is used to. We acknowledge it wordlessly, me by coming to the bar more often, her by these inclusive glances, as if my presence has moved into a more familiar octave. She’s now pouring white wine into glasses for two men who have just walked in.

They’re continuing a discussion they were having in the street. Sarah is listening to it. I can see them on the other side of Bernice, who has her back to them. Their arms and elbows have freckled skin and russet hairs. Their skin hues blend so much they could be brothers, but the bone structure of their faces, their voices and their evident friendship are not the silence and intermittent bursts of talk between two brothers. Here is an easy conversation between old friends – soothing, seamless, filled to the brim with just the right amount of silence and talk. They seem to have both walked out from the desert with their sandshoes and their beige shirts with buttoned pockets over tired jeans.

Yet their freshly laundered clothes and clean-shaven faces speak of some kind of old-fashioned academic fastidiousness. They could be engineers or anthropologists. They could be psychoanalysts, farmers or defrocked priests for all I know. Anyway, they seem interested in miscellaneous information.

‘A woman has just died from drinking ten litres of coke a day,’ floats over to me.

There is so much compassion in the voice that I turn round to catch a glimpse of the speaker. He looks like a smoother, russet Raymond Carver, and his friend a freckled Cormac McCarthy.

When the Raymond Carver says, ‘There’s a good chance of an African pope,’ I see Sarah smile.

Bernice, her head sunk in her shoulders, is oblivious, complaining about Triple R.

‘I don’t know how long I can do this show anymore. Listening to all these people and pretending to be this happiness-whisperer … Oh, my God …’

She sighs.

‘What is wrong with me? After I’ve had one evening with them, they’re gone. I could be an advertisement for how to frighten men away faster than a shrill transvestite.’

Her tone tries for sarcasm, but her syllables rise up in the air, as clear and crisp as a choirboy’s. I notice smiles spreading on the two men’s faces.

Bernice is now shaking her head despondently.

‘You know, I’m sure I’ll end up with twins. My family is rife with them. Single mother with twins: what a combo.’

The bar around us is full and starting to sway like a ship. It’s the moment in the evening when a bar takes off. I can sense the two men listening to Bernice. Then they return to their conversation.

‘Children have been killed by televisions falling from walls,’ Raymond Carver says, before his face falls and he throws a comical glance at Cormac McCarthy, thrusting his chin in Bernice’s direction, as if he were afraid of having committed a blunder next to this woman speaking of kids.

He seems to be the kind of man who treads around women tenderly, in fear of causing a single sigh, lest their mysterious feelings be hurt. He could possibly be reading Jane Austen in his spare time as a form of guilty pleasure. I imagine a woman proffering a ‘Let’s fuck,’ and he, after painstakingly removing her clothes, helping her put them back on again afterwards. Then, when she has left, he’ll sit on his bed staring down at his hands. His friend shakes his head reassuringly.

‘Did you read that in The Age on the tram over here from work?’

‘Yeah,’ nods Carver, ‘nothing like the archaeology of the present.’

They remind me of two cowboys, sitting in their saddles at a station, staring straight through their horses’ twitching ears – at loose trains of thought. But Bernice’s ears have pricked up for the first time. Their words have trickled into her lower cortex. She swings round.

‘Is that true? How many children have died?’

They turn round as one, to gaze at Bernice properly and when they do, they have the same reaction – their smiles broaden again.

‘Two, I think, in the past two months, in Western Australia.’

Bernice bounces on her stool.

‘That’s one a month.’

They nod at her benignly and penitently. Soon she knows their jobs, where they come from, and what they are doing in Melbourne. They are now inviting us for a drink, and include Sarah, who throws me one of her indecipherable glances as she comes over to give them to us. She never drinks when she’s behind the bar.

They are archaeologists, working in the CBD, called in when a big excavation is made for the foundations of a new building. Soon we are all talking together, as archaeology brings the bones of our elbows closer. Sarah leans forward:

‘How interesting. One always imagines Aboriginal remains being dug up to rival Africa as holding the oldest DNA in the world. Finding remnants of the Jazz Age seems more flippant somehow.’

To their credit the two men take this with good grace, almost bashfully bending their heads. No chip on the shoulder in sight. I feel myself warming to them. Raymond Carver rubs his shaved chin with the heel of his hand.

‘Yes … It does seem that way. But it’s really more about culture than DNA. Memory and culture – what Australians crave. Yet we have so much of it. You wouldn’t imagine the stories we dig up.’

Bernice’s eyes light up. She majored in history. Raymond Carver is called Harry. He has some land outside of Melbourne and on weekends lives on it in a caravan, renting a bachelor pad in the city with his friend. They’re looking for somewhere quieter, because working in the CBD is noisy enough. Cormac carries the more unconventional name of Francis, because his mother was a fan of St Francis of Assisi, even though she wasn’t Catholic. She had read the Fioretti and knew the story of his life backwards.

‘I never understood why,’ he adds. ‘She was a staunch atheist, but there was something that drew her. Maybe it was the way animals were more impressed by him than were bishops. Then she was killed – out in the bush – by a fallen branch. She should have known better than to pitch her tent under an old tree in a storm. She was good in the bush and would never have wandered off in an uninformed way. Her body was found weeks later – unrecognisable. Animals had … ’

He stops, his face suffused with a painful blush. His friend Harry is staring at him.

‘You never told me that.’

The blush deepens.

‘No, I … don’t usually … ’

Many truths are uttered in the cloister of the bar. Maybe the things we say when we drink, when we get a bit looser, have something saintly about them, and explain Sarah’s choice of pew-like wooden seating.

Bernice sits up, clutching her beer.

‘Well, I think she died in a beautiful way. I would love to go in one fell swoop when my time has come.’

Francis is no longer flushed.

‘Yes, they told me she hadn’t suffered, probably hadn’t even known what happened to her.’

When one isn’t grieving, a comment on someone’s death can be such an invasion of privacy. Yet Bernice has managed it in a blink.

Francis’s eyes seem to hover over Bernice as if she’d melt or disappear if he took his eyes off her. I notice that Harry’s eyes are behaving the same way. They may not be brothers, but they seem to have the same taste. Bernice is at her best; you’d think she was on her radio show. She’s sunny and natural, unimpeded by dating anxiety or Victorian angst.

After that all five of us seem to be on an even keel, as if Francis’s mother had given us her benediction. We have even accepted her scavengers.

An hour later, it’s neither Sarah nor I who walk a slightly unsteady Bernice home.