13

WARBURTON

The day feels quite old now, as if it had to catch its breath. My footsteps seem to be following me. Even the trees seem to hesitate. Places must attract certain categories of sadness and joy, just as they attract certain kinds of undergrowth, bees, snakes, rivers or stagnant waters. I’d certainly be contributing my bit as one of the stagnant waters right now. At the bus stop, I look hard at the Werribee sky and bushland and then stare at another big ghost gum standing at an intersection, as if my life depended on it. Its strength is eerie and solid at the same time, feeding itself from both earth and sky. I catch the bus and the train home out of a kind of muscle memory. At one point there is a buzz in my backpack. It’s a text from Sarah: ‘Where r u?’ My finger answers: ‘On the way back.’

When I step out of Jewel station into Brunswick again, she’s there, in her car, her wry smile set firmly on her face. She winds her window down.

‘Good job you’re all packed. Jump in.’

I don’t even think, and sit with my backpack on my knees as I did on the bus, on the train. The images floating out of the window don’t seem to gel. My sense of place has completely disappeared. Soon I am so far gone I don’t feel I’m in Australia anymore. Even Sarah’s driving has lost its edge for me. I am fast asleep.

I dream of a dentist’s waiting room. The place feels frozen in time. The dentist may as well be away on a holiday – stale magazines are fanned out on a table, the electric light is yellow and stingy, pillars of dust motes stand in the window’s wide shaft of light, though it’s a window that’s always closed, even in summer. Deep down from the courtyard of the building, one can hear laughter, but these echoes seem to float up from a distant planet. The patients waiting for their turn do not feel real. They all sit next to each other in unearthly silence until the dentist’s disembodied voice calls their name from another room. When they walk into his surgery, the chair is a gaping jaw. With hardly a word, the dentist bends over them, his movements swimmingly slow. He looks like a lawyer or a businessman; you’d never take him for a dentist. The fact he is dressed in white is vaguely disturbing, as if he were involved in some sort of organ traffic. When he does talk, his eyes narrow to gauge his patient’s fear. And he always hurts, even for the simplest procedure. They get out of there finally and start walking under the tall plane trees of the busy avenue at the foot of his building. But their beings have lost their consistency – they might as well be that car, that bus or that sparrow. I wake up with a jerk; Sarah has honked her horn at a kangaroo on the road. I ask her how long I dozed off.

‘An hour and a bit,’ she says and throws me a glance. ‘I could have taken you all the way to Marree if I’d wanted, couldn’t I?’

I look at her.

‘Is that the plan?’

But we don’t go that far. Sarah drives until suburbs are blotted out by green hills, then she parks on the side of a field. Soon we are roaming along a country lane.

‘Look, this is the Great Dividing Range, which begins out west of Melbourne, peters out to the north of the city, picks up again around here in the mountains to the north of the Yarra Valley, and then stretches all the way to north Queensland,’ she informs me with a grand gesture.

Her sense of direction suits the swing in her step and the power of her sculptures.

‘But where are we right now?’ I bleat.

‘Warburton.’

Farms are dotted here and there. Lazy acres of land well up to meet a prairie of blue sky and a few sheepish clouds. We walk and walk. Pleasantly sweaty and tired, I find myself floating beside her without effort. The blue fields of sky are tumbling into a patchwork of intertwining hills. Somehow it reminds me of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love with its terrible balloon, floating off – something disastrous could happen any minute. There is no emotion anywhere: the air is sucked out of the landscape and only helium remains. Everything is high on helium, the trees, the grass, the odd wombat, the odd wallaby, and the two women, Sarah and I. I breathe in disaster, as I didn’t when we were walking by the creek and were really in danger. Suddenly Jack’s memory, or lack of it, has turned into a torrential emptiness eating away at everything I look at. Instead of the bronze statues of strutting conquerors, absence is celebrated in Australia’s cities. This is the land of disappearance and oblivion, of Burke and Wills setting off and vanishing, of heroes never to return.

When we walk back to the car, Sarah drives till she finds a bed and breakfast. It’s an eco-friendly place with three cabins, each with a small wooden verandah, a fireplace and one or two bedrooms. The owner, who lives in the largest house, is a taciturn woman with sandy-grey hair, curt to the point of rudeness. Sarah can do taciturn too and they gear into a sort of negative sympathy. We sort things out, wrestle a key from her reluctant grasp, and walk to our allotted cabin. Sarah opens the door and looks around as if she were checking out a saloon.

‘She probably thought we were lesbians.’

Plonking her bag on the table, she pulls out a bottle of wine and puts a match to the paper, kindling and logs in the fireplace. It may be summer, but in the mountains the night air is crisp. I lean my backpack against the sofa and hang around while she produces cheese, olives, bread, ham and grapes.

Half an hour later, the wine is flowing through my system without affecting me in any way. Maybe I’m still too high on helium. Sarah is sitting close to the fire with her arms around her knees. I’m on the floor too, leaning against the sofa. The flames are doing the talking, the whispering, the promising. We only share a desultory word here and there, in between the crackle and the spark. The crispness in the room mingles with the fire, making warmth a precious, living thing. Outside, the shadows of the trees seem to be crowding nearer to look inside. I don’t recognise the night up here, its texture is so unlike that of Melbourne. It comes on more like a presence, instead of plain darkness. My daughter, Night, my wide-coated daughter …, an old man had whispered to a dark train window sliding through a tunnel. I can’t remember where or when I saw and heard this whispering stranger, but my memory of him is sharper than my last glimpse of Jack. Could that be the last time I will ever see him? I push the idea away, breathing air instead of helium into my lungs.

When Sarah next speaks, her tone is so casual I am lulled into thinking she’s again referring to the Great Dividing Range. Her words in themselves don’t make sense to me at first. They come out like a mere comment.

‘Gerald didn’t disappear, you know.’

I feel my lips drag themselves to each side of my face in a sort of bewildered grin.

‘What do you mean, Sarah?’

She doesn’t answer straight away and by that time her words have finally trickled into the small part of my brain that makes sense of things.

‘Are you speaking about Mary’s father?’

She nods assent, and continues her thrust.

‘Yes. But he did leave his car at Marree, which is the last small town before the desert. And he did stride off into the desert in inappropriate clothing, like Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas. That’s true, at any rate.’

Sarah is now standing with her back to the flames, looking at me thoughtfully. I hadn’t noticed her rise from the floor, as if she’d operated some sleight of body.

‘The thing is, we all know exactly where he is now.’

I find this hard to assimilate.

‘Are you telling me he’s alive?’

I hear her sigh, weighing her thoughts, steadying herself, before she lines up and kicks for goal.

‘We all thought he was dead. There were search parties and helicopters – the works. The police checked his credit card all the time. He didn’t use it once. Then – all of a sudden, there he was, back in Adelaide. Mary was the one who texted me to say he was okay.’

I am so surprised I just gape at her. This is either too much, or not enough, information after two rotund glasses of wine. A whole scaffolding is tumbling down, not that I needed that scaffolding, not that it held anything up – but the view, now, is completely different.

I pull my legs up, gathering them against my chest.

‘But Sarah … why … for what reason? How long did he disappear?’

Her expression changes without moving her features.

‘He disappeared for two whole months.’

I get up and sit on the sofa.

‘Two months!’

‘Yes.’

She digs her hands deep into her pockets.

‘Two whole months, making everybody worried sick – including me.’

She grins unhappily.

‘So when I got Mary’s text, I never answered it. I continued to refer to him as lost, refusing the new version of the facts. I took him at his word.’

There is a silence after that. I wish we were on the hill again. Somehow the room feels too small for this kind of revelation.

I saw a man once, painting the floor of his shop in Brunswick. He was standing, stranded, on a raft of unpainted floor in the middle of the room. He had painted himself right out of the place. I saw his eyes as I walked by on the footpath. Sarah’s green slits have exactly the same expression. Above them, her dark fringe is still as slick and straight as the shadow of a knife in Hitchcock.

She snorts.

‘He wanted to disappear. Well, let him, I thought. The others understood at first, even Mary. They were pissed off with him too, of course. And he and I were divorced, after all.’

I frown.

‘But why did he do it? Because of your quarrel?’

She swings her arms in a rowing movement. ‘I have no fucking idea.’ I take a chance.

‘Do you feel the whole thing has hardened so much that it can’t be resurrected?’

She bites her lip and stares at me.

‘He never bothered to explain.’

Then her voice jerks out of kilter.

‘But I know he’s okay. Mary sees him. My mother sees him. They all see him. It’s a giant unspoken mess – not only between me and him, but between me and them.’

I gulp down my wine.

‘So when you talk with Mary it’s as if he were still lost?’

She turns back towards the fire.

‘Yes, that’s it.’

I look into my glass.

‘Oh.’

I don’t know what else to say. But somehow I understand. It reminds me of Russian dolls. The smallest one, the heaviest, the densest, locked into all the others, is the most important. But you can’t reach her until you’ve opened all the bigger ones. I get up and sit down again.

‘Did you ever find out what happened to him?’

She shakes her head.

‘No, and I didn’t ask.’

I swallow that information and ask feebly, ‘What about his car?’ more to break the silence than to get an answer.

She snorts again.

‘The car was offered as a sacrificial victim – a scapegoat.’

I sit there as Sarah stares straight through me.

‘The joke’s turned so bitter. I can’t make head nor tail of it. And now of course Mary’s draped in her own bitter blue joke.’

Pressing against the French windows, night has stepped up. The chestnut trees have been drawn into its black coat. Sarah’s still standing and kicking a log with the toe of her boot. She looks thoughtful and strong, her lonely strength oozing out of her – a strength that has brought me here with her, another person who has had to curb her enthusiasm. It’s not about bitter jokes, it’s not about the stupid misunderstandings; it’s about all we leave unsaid – about what brings us to these conundrums. When we paint ourselves out of our own lives our situations become just as desperate as some more tangible tragedy. I expected some secret about Sarah, some mystery, of course, but this hard, weird anticlimax is a non sequitur. It leaves no road for her, no bridges, no avenue for empathy. It reminds me of the Korean philosophy of Han – of a sadness that is so great there are no more tears.

I bend towards her.

‘Sarah, I’m sure that all this has nothing to do with Mary’s burqa. Nothing. This is Mary’s business alone; it has no connection with her father or you. Don’t ask me why. But it feels obvious to me.’

The relief on her face is palpable, as if we had reached the smallest Russian doll.

‘Do you really feel that?’

She dusts herself suddenly.

‘Shall we go for a walk? That is, if you’re not off taking nature walks with me. At least there’s no creek around here and any rapists must be huddled by a fire.’

Then we are walking in between the shapes and the shadows of the chestnut trees, towards a smear of bush leaking out into the thickening night. I tell her about Werribee Zoo. It’s more like a weather report. I don’t want to dwell on it. We both know it’s no use saying too much. It was a wild bet and I lost it. She drops her arm for a second around my shoulders. We hear the sudden screech of a bird in the bush and a scamper in the undergrowth. Then we walk on, stumbling on dead branches and wading through shrubs as the sounds of the bush crackle and hiss all around us, a bit like the fire. We make out a path in the dark, meandering between tall eucalypts. Sarah shoots me a glance.

‘Makes you feel like bloody Hansel and Gretel, doesn’t it?’

I laugh for the first time in days. And suddenly we both know we have a chance in this life of ours, even as the moon appears above us in between the branches, sailing her ship, blessing everything in her glow.