The Man in the
Pandanus Palms
When Bea, my mum Bea, was a child, Charade says, she was impossible. Everybody said so.
“This is the border,” she told Kay. Down the middle of their bedroom she made a dotted line of dirty socks. “You can’t spread your neatness across.”
Bea’s side was rank as a forest. Underpants bloomed on doorknobs, stockings fluttered, clothes and bedding ran amok across the floor. There were comic books in geological strata, deep undulating layers of them, and there were other things, stranger things: a Men at Work sign, a railwayman’s cap, a schoolroom clock with no hands. “Stolen,” Bea announced, patting such possessions with a small contented smile. Under Bea’s mattress lurked the deeply and potently forbidden: cigarettes, movie posters, shocking pictures.
Is God waiting to strike her dead? Kay asked herself.
Though Bea would give Him a run for His money.
Once, in church, while Kay’s father raised his hands above the bread and wine and closed his eyes and tipped his head back to gaze at heaven, Bea nudged Kay and passed her a Bible. Open it, she mouthed. At the place where the bookmark was, Kay found a postcard. I fell in love with Surfers, it said. There were breakers, a curve of white sand, a clump of pandanus palms — the kind that grew in the dunes at Surfers’ Paradise and Burleigh Heads. An innocent beach, but high gloss. Glazed lines shimmered and crisscrossed the waves and pandanus spears, and made Kay’s eyes water. She looked at Bea, puzzled, and Bea smirked. Tip it, she mouthed, making an up-and-down motion with her open hand and squinting.
Kay tilted the card and looked at it through half-shut eyes. She gasped and closed the Bible quickly. Inside, between the twenty-second and the twenty-third psalms, a man and a woman, stark naked, stood among the pandanus clumps.
Kay’s father’s voice lifted and fell and circled in prayer, going on and on. Flies crawled their languid way across the pews. Mosquitoes, bloated, glutted with pentecostal blood, mumbled lazy hymns. Kay stole another look between the psalms. The man and the woman were waiting, their bodies facing her. They were not looking at each other though their hands were reaching out, touching, playing blind man’s bluff. The man was touching the woman’s breast and the woman’s fingers were touching oh shame oh unbelievable oh act which could not not be watched —
“He that eateth and drinketh unworthily,” Kay’s father said, “eateth and drinketh damnation to himself.”
The Bible snapped itself shut, a divine clamshell. Kay waited for its covers to blister, she put her bruised and burning fingers in her mouth. She closed her eyes and felt her heart thumping and saw it as a dirty pulsing little ball that bounced through sewage and mud. She imagined God catching it, in His infinite mercy and patience and sorrow, and dipping it in the Blood of the Lamb and giving it back whiter than snow. Now don’t get it dirty again, He said sadly.
She opened her eyes and saw Bea waiting, smiling, angelic in the House of the Lord.
Kay put her hand over her mouth to stifle a gasp that threatened to become subversive, irrepressible, a geyser of laughter. She looked up into the motes of dust, bright and blinding, where they eddied high at the treetop edge of the long slim windows, but God gave no sign, frown or smile.
He can’t do a thing with her either, Kay thought. He’s the same as everybody else.
About Bea, all grownups shook their heads and smiled.
But did Bea care? Did Bea care what anyone thought? She cared, Kay sometimes dared to hope, about what Kay thought.
And Kay, devoted, was prepared to die for Bea. She burned nobly, fervently, for the chance; although she knew how likely it was that Bea, a lightning rod of risk, would be the first to be consumed, going showily, extravagantly, into the Catherine wheel of the future.
It was a kind of miracle that Bea squandered time and attention on Kay, who knew only useless book-ridden things, who so often at school relied on Bea’s sharp tongue for protection. (Verity, distant and insubstantial as the angels in heaven, having long ago moved on to high school.)
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Kay’s thumping heart promised, Bea would not let anyone
hurt me.
Everybody loved Bea. Everyone said she was impossible.
The first time Kay saw Nicholas, she thought immediately — for some obscure reason — of the man in the pandanus palms.
“Oh!” she said. There were candle flames pricking madly across the hills and valleys — especially the valleys — of
her skin.
“I saw him first,” Bea said.
Of course it was true. Bea knew the most interesting places, she found them the way a bee finds frangipani trees. “I know a place beside the high school,” she said. “You can see things.”
Bea was obsessed with the high school, though she herself did not expect ever to go there. “Too dumb,” she would shrug, not at all embarrassed. “In some ways,” she would add, rolling her eyes. Already, while only in the seventh grade (Kay, eleven months younger, trailing behind her in the sixth), Bea earned ten shillings a week working in the shop near the high school; she slipped cigarettes under the counter; she was very familiar with the high school grounds.
It was a new high school on the edge of Brisbane, where the rainforest came down from Mt Glorious in long slender lizards’ tongues and licked at the edges of the city. At lunch time, and late in the afternoon, the high school boys and girls came in pairs and lay down in the long grass that parted and swayed and closed over the seedpods of their bodies.
“But from the trees,” Bea said, “you can watch. And I know another place, even better, in Finsbury Park. There’s a boy from Churchie who comes there.”
“Churchie?”
“It’s a high school, you drip, for rich kids. Rich boys. Only boys go to Churchie.”
Kay followed Bea with awe up into the branches of a mango tree in Finsbury Park. The things Bea knew!
The Churchie boy came alone to Finsbury Park. He hung his hat from a twig by its grosgrain band (of school colours: blue and grey); he tugged at his blue and grey tie so that it lay slackly, a rakish noose, about his neck; he undid the laces of his heavy black shoes and kicked them off, he peeled off his socks. He rolled his trousers (flannel, charcoal grey) up to the knee. He undid the buttons of his shirt and laced his hands behind his neck and lay back in the grass. The sun glinted off the pale golden down on his chest and gathered itself like a corona on the butter-gold shock of his hair, the beautiful butter-gold hair that fell in curls
across his forehead and almost hid his right eye from view.
“Oh,” Kay breathed, and felt the pricking and fanning and sighing and burning of the thousand and one tiny flames that lived in the hollows of her body.
Bea’s eyes glittered, green flecks on the brown-black, they glitter-darted like dragonfly wings. “His name is Nicholas,” she whispered. “He’s mine.”
And Kay, resisting for the first time in her life, thought: She can have everything else. She can have anything else of mine she wants. I will give her my bottle of mineral sands from Fraser Island, with the blue and purple and pink stripes and loops, I know she wants it; and I will give her my jasmine soap still in its tissue paper and my white stone from the cave on Tibrogargan. I will let her mess up my side of the room and I will do anything she asks, anything else that she asks.
And I will never think about the man in the pandanus palms again — Kay squeezed her eyes shut, blocking out that wicked unforgettable sight — I will never think of him, dear God, dearest God, not ever, I promise, cross my heart and hope to die, if You will just …
Nicholas sat up and pulled a paperback book from the hip pocket of his trousers. Bea and Kay held hands and bit their wrists and clung tightly to the branch with their legs, buffeted by shockwaves of nervous pleasure.
“He always does that,” Bea spluttered. “He reads and reads. And sometimes he plays a recorder.”
“A recorder …?” The outrageous, the incredible things Bea knew. They had to stuff leaves into their mouths to keep their excitement tied up and out of Nicholas’s hearing.
“It’s true, it’s true!” Bea hissed. “Just you wait. He keeps his recorder down inside the front of his pants. It’s true!”
This was altogether too much and Kay had to hug the branch with both arms and legs to keep from falling out. Squeezing her thighs around the bark, ignoring the scratching, ignoring the sticky sap, locking her ankles together, she bit into the mango bark and closed her eyes and when the pandanus sprang up, grove upon grove beneath her lashes, she only pressed her eyelids tighter and refused to look, not even when Bea swung monkey-like across her branch and tickled her and warned convulsively: “Don’t wet your pants, don’t wet your —” Then she whispered urgently, “Look! Look! I told you.”
Nicholas put down his book and lay back in the grass and there was a recorder in his hands. Kay blinked.
“He keeps it,” Bea whispered with wicked gestures, “down inside —”
“I don’t believe you.”
“That’s because you’re —”
But Nicholas began to play and they were too love-struck, too besotted to speak. They were hypnotised. They were ill with desire.
“Oh,” Kay moaned. The air was thick with bellbirds, with hymns, with mango music. Choirs of angels swept through the stringybarks.
“Sometimes,” Bea whispered, “he pisses in the bushes. I’ve seen his dick.”
Kay put her hands over her ears.
“His name is Nicholas Truman,” Bea said. “And after he finishes high school, he’s going to go to the university.”
“Shhh! He’ll hear you. Shhh!” But Kay said it over to herself: university. It sounded thrilling, dangerous, an impossible and tantalising place.
“And when I’ve finished grade eight,” Bea whispered fiercely, “I’m gonna work in the shop all day and then he’s gonna marry me.”
Kay wished it were possible to disbelieve Bea. In a year and a half, she thought, her heart fluttering. In just a year and a half.
“Watch me,” Bea whispered, swinging out, slithering, sliding along the slipways of the mango tree and dropping down inside the pandanus grass.
But Kay waited only until she heard the two voices touch each other, matchwood to matchwood. “G’day, Nicholas,” she heard. “I’m Bea, from the shop, remember? And Kay — that’s my stepsister — she’s up there in that tree, she watches you.” O treachery! There was a quick flare of response, the voices colliding and striking laughter; and then Kay dropped to the ground and ran.
“It isn’t fair,” she yelled at the wattles. She grabbed a stringybark sapling in passing and yanked it, pulled it over till its tip touched the ground. “It isn’t fair,” she said, addressing the comment upwards. She let the tree spring heavenward like
a whip.
Me and Nicholas, Bea said later. Me and Nicholas this; me and Nicholas that. Seventh grade, eighth me-and-Nicholas grade.
“I don’t care,” Kay told her passionately, savagely pushing beyond the dotted line of socks, picking up underpants, stacking comics. “If he sees your room,” she said, “he’ll be sick.”
This is the scene Kay plays and replays.
First the two horses, one blue-black and the other chestnut, are coming out of the rainforest; not the Tamborine rainforest where Bea will one day live, but the pocket of forest on Mt Glorious right on the lip of Brisbane. The horses emerge from the hiking paths and stand muzzle to muzzle at the edge of the picnic ground. There are riders, of course, that much can be seen; but they are distant. There is no more reason to invest them with significance, or even to wonder idly about them, than there is to pay attention to the man over there at the lookout, the one who is adjusting the telescope, putting in his two-shilling piece and no doubt seeing everything from Ashgrove to the Pacific in a shining rush.
Bea is not present at this picnic. Bea is absolutely, definitely, absent. Quite often, these days, Bea just isn’t around when it’s time to leave for a family outing. She has “things to do, that’s all”.
“Other fish to fry,” she tells Kay.
Before the picnic lunch, she is mentioned in prayer by Kay’s father. And Your wayward child, Bea, dear Lord, who is precious in Thy sight …
Bea is not present when the horses come out of the forest. Muzzle to muzzle, they crop grass at the edge of the picnic ground.
For ten whole minutes, perhaps, Kay watches them idly, not knowing that life is about to change, that time will convulse, turn a somersault, taunt her. In retrospect, it is this calm space (with the horses and riders there, in her field of vision) that tantalises her; that begets an addiction; that has her, on insomniac nights, prodding at ideas of randomness and fate, an eighth-grade philosopher obsessed with the laws of causality.
Is all of it chance? Or none of it?
“Oh look!” Kay’s mother says. “Horses. Let’s go over.”
Kay lifts her head, curious. Why is it wrong (well, at any rate, still improper, still unsuitable, still of absolute inconsequence at home) to know about Phar Lap, to pause in front of other people’s radios and listen for those few frantic Melbourne-Cup minutes, but not improper to want to go and see two horses at the edge of a picnic ground? Clues are the stuff of Kay’s daily life; gathering data; drawing conclusions. She joins her mother.
Was there a moment …? Could she pinpoint it …? Must there not have been some point, some particular second in Eastern Australian time, ten hours ahead of the Greenwich Mean, when a certain progression of awareness could have been pinned down, graphed, indicated with tiny black crosses in a mathematics exercise book …? And would it read jaggedly, a series of steps? Or would it be an impeccable curve, a flawless flowing from:
(1) there are riders;
(2) they are wearing jodhpurs and white shirts and bush hats;
(3) one seems to be a woman;
(4) yes, one is certainly a woman with long black hair;
(5) the other is a man who —
And then, considerably before it would have been possible to distinguish either face, what kind of pre-knowledge is it that reaches out, that robs you of breath, that makes you stumble …? There is a certain space when no record-keeping is possible, the graph of awareness unplottable.
“Hello!” Kay’s mother calls. “What beautiful horses. Can we pat them?”
Kay thinks she is going to faint. Pieces of ground slide around her, their motion sickening. Remember Phar Lap? she considers, illogically, calling out, as though this might break her fall.
“Hello!” Nicholas says. The voice strikes her the way God’s voice must have struck Moses on the mountain, a divine reverberation. She cannot look. “Hello,” he says again, concerned. “Is something the matter with your little girl?”
Little girl, Kay hears and wishes to die. The gap between herself and Bea widens; they are both fourteen but in the eighth grade, Kay is often mistaken for a ten-year-old; Bea, only eleven months older and already working (she says) for some man in the city, is often taken for a fully grown woman. Seventeen or eighteen at least.
“Katherine?” her mother says, startled, looking back. “What is it, Katherine?”
Kay’s eyes are watering, she can see nothing but pinwheels of light. “Nothing,” she mumbles, rubbing them. “I’ve got something in my eye.”
“The horses won’t hurt you,” Nicholas says. “You’re not frightened, are you? Here, wouldn’t you like a ride?” And there is apparently a succession of movements — rather in the manner of a cyclone moving down from the Bundaberg coast — and one of the gods has descended and swept her up and her legs are straddling the shoulders of the chestnut mare and she is looking the other blue-black horse in the eye.
Oh humiliation. (To be hefted up as though she were a child!)
Oh bliss.
Nicholas’s left arm is lightly around her waist. His right hand, resting in front of her on the red-gold neck of the horse, is looped and ribboned with the reins. She can see each precious knuckle, a press of ivory bone against the tanned skin; she can see the pale down of hairs that begin at the cuff of his shirtsleeve and ride up toward the bases of his fingers; she can see the fishnet, the webbing, the myriad tiny lines of his skin. She has never seen anything so beautiful.
Seafoam drips from the mouth of the blue-black horse and it whinnies. Nicholas wheels the chestnut mare and laughs, and Kay’s mother calls “Oh careful, do be careful!”
“Isn’t she a pretty little thing?” Nicholas laughs, and musses her hair.
Me, Kay thinks. He means me.
“Isn’t she pretty, Verity?” he calls.
It is possible that the blood which is banging against the top of Kay’s head and the tips of her fingers will come spurting out like a blast from a fire hose, lavishly crimson. She waits for an answer from the rider of the blue-black horse. She knows exactly how that voice should sound.
She dares at last to look, squinting, and shading her eyes.
Verity does not squint. Verity’s horse, though it champs and tosses its head, does not move without her permission. Verity is watching Kay with the attentiveness of a collector assessing an object that just might — and yet cannot be, surely? — that just might, conceivably, be so valuable that … The collector is quiet with excitement, very quiet, waiting to place a bid, not wanting to alert …
“What’s the matter?” Nicholas calls to her gaily. “I won’t drop her, you know, Verity. She’s quite safe.”
Kay has no ordered thoughts at all, though later she concludes that she is certainly not surprised. What could have been more natural? As fish fall back into the sea, as bellbirds keep to the gullies … What could have kept Nicholas and Verity apart?
Verity asks: “What school do you go to?”
Kay cannot speak, but her mother, embarrassingly helpful, says: “She’s at Wilston State. She’s in grade eight and her teacher thinks she might win the Lily Medal. She wants to go to university.”
Mum! Kay pleads in soundless anguish, in silent mortification.
Verity says: “I went to Wilston State.”
Kay looks at her then. It seems to her that nothing has changed, not the dark eyes, not the grave and level stare, not the hand in the pocket. It might have been yesterday, that day in the Wilston school library. Verity’s fingers, their shapes visible against the skin of her riding pants, count and recount hidden objects.
Raisins, Kay thinks.
Verity nods, as though a contract has been agreed to. She does not smile. (Has Verity ever smiled?) She says: “You’re Katherine Sussex. I remember.”
That is where the movie stops.
Kay could not, no matter how many nights she lay awake, get herself down off the horse, or make Verity explain the years between, or free Nicholas’s hand from the reins.
She had, with elaborate and labyrinth comments, tried to waylay her mother.
“Mum, do you remember that picnic at Mt Glorious?”
“Which picnic?”
“Oh that time … I don’t think Bea was there. I think … was there one time when we saw some horses?”
“Horses? We often saw horses. Which time do you mean?”
“Yes but … one time we talked to the people on the horses. And … and didn’t someone give me a ride?”
“Talk?” Her mother sighs. “Strangers were always offering you sweeties or rides or something, it was dangerous, you’d go off at the drop of a hat. We had to keep our eyes peeled. Which time do you mean?”
* *
Kay learned a year later, from her Latin teacher in high school, the word syllogism. She loved to roll it on her tongue. Syllogism. She saw mind bending backwards, turning somersaults, doing the splits. Syllogism: a game of construction and deconstruction.
She wrote on the flyleaf of her Latin primer:
Daydreams seem harmless, but they are dangerous.
I daydreamed that Bea would come to Brisbane.
Therefore Bea’s father died.
Daydreams seem real, but they are just delusions.
I daydream about Nicholas and Verity.
Therefore they might not be real.
Daydreams are dangerous and real.
At school I dreamed of someone to protect me.
Therefore I made up Verity and she became real.
I wanted to see Verity again.
I wanted Nicholas to touch me.
Therefore I made them meet.
Kay resorted, finally, to the test of fire. Casually, so very casually, she said to Bea: “Do you remember that boy we used to watch when we were still in Wilston school? That high school boy?”
“Nicholas Truman?” Bea asked.
“Was that his name? The one who used to play a recorder?”
Bea hurled herself onto her bed and shrieked with laughter. “Recorder! You silly ninny! Did you believe that stuff I used to tell you? Did you really and truly believe? Honestly, Kay, you’re such a drip, you’re the most — I don’t believe you swallowed that —”
“Anyway, I think I saw him. He was with a girl, this beautiful girl. She has long black —”
“Oh, her.” Bea lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. “Verity Ashkenazy. She went to Wilston too, so Nicholas says. Damned if I remember. She’s a bit, you know …” Bea tapped her forehead with one finger. “I’m not too worried about her.”