People Who Climb
Glass Houses
“In Toronto,” Charade tells Koenig, “the Royal Bank tower is made of glass.”
“I know,” Koenig says.
Charade is startled. “Oh. Yes, of course you do. I forgot that you … I get confused.”
He laughs. “You get confused!”
“I was confused that day with Aunt Kay.”
“In Toronto.”
“Yes. In Toronto,” she sighs. “It was very confusing …”
“Which is us?” Charade asks, and the mirrored plates clamour back in noisy facets: which is us which is us which is us?
Twenty Katherines laugh, twenty Charades reach uncertainly toward all the Katherines. Mild dizziness swoops at them, and a sense of groping. Toronto passes and repasses like clouds. And the glass tower of the Royal Bank watches impassively.
“I sometimes think,” Katherine sighs, as taxis thread their way through her hair, “that I owe the reappearance of Nicholas to a random conjunction of Borges and the Royal Bank building. Because it happened here. I saw his reflection first.”
Charade shakes her head, a time-swimmer flicking watery daze from her lashes, the race-lanes curling and jumping in the deep shifting pool of her history. “But … you’ve lost me again … how did we get to Toronto?”
“You don’t remember driving in? And the subway?”
“I mean the twenty-five years in between. From the Glasshouse Mountains to here.”
“Yes,” Katherine sighs. The unpredictable pleats in time, the juxtapositions. “It always baffles me,” she says. “From 1759 to here just like that.” She snaps her fingers.
Charade blinks. “What?”
“If Cook had sailed further upriver with Wolfe …” Katherine says and trails off. If he’d kept going past Ville de Quebec, back in 1759, would these shining obelisks have amazed him any more or less than the ones he saw on the Queensland coast just eleven years later? “If he’d looked round a bend in time?”
Charade puts out a hand — as though to steady herself. Or perhaps trying to catch hold of the reflections that flit through Katherine’s mind.
“I know,” Katherine sighs. Someone we haven’t yet met, she thinks, is waiting for us. “It happens all the time,” she says.
“Aunt Kay, please,’’ Charade whispers. Her heart is hammering. (Will her father appear on Cook’s navigation charts?)
“Are you all right?” Koenig asks in some alarm.
“Sorry,” Charade says. “Just the force of that moment coming back, when I thought Nicholas was about to … I thought I might fall right through Toronto to Queensland. But it was just, you know, shadows, reflections, the old story. And I’d have to admit” — she trails an index finger down Koenig’s chest — “yes, I’d have to admit that the Royal Bank in Toronto, seen from a certain angle at a certain time of day, definitely reminds me of Crookneck. It’s the view Nicholas would have had driving up from Brisbane on the day of the picnic. And of course it’s the view Cook had from the Endeavour.”
“I’m making every endeavour,” sighs her lover, “but the thread of this story —”
“Cook’s second voyage. In 1770. I’ve already told you about it. You know, the Transit of Venus in Tahiti, the landing at Botany Bay, then the long trip up inside the reef, hugging the Queensland coast. In Moreton Bay, the sun hit the basalt and blinded him. From the ship he thought he was seeing glass towers.”
“Ah.” Koenig reaches for the chair beside the bed and fishes in the pockets of his coat. “Clear as a riddle.”
“I’m not making this up,” Charade says petulantly. “This is history.” She slides off the bed and begins pacing round the room. At the window she pauses, watching him light his pipe, watching the bedroom mirror where he appears left-handed. Two flames, one in and one not in the mirror, quaver between the booklet of matches and his meerschaum. Absorbed she watches his right hand, his left hand, dip the twin flames into tobacco. “For us,” she says as his mirror-mouth sucks in smoke, “for Queenslanders, the Glasshouse Mountains are like … well, like Niagara Falls or the Statue of Liberty, perhaps. Every Brisbane kid, practically, climbs them, it’s a rite of passage. Especially Tibrogargan, you climb it first on a grade school picnic probably, but again and again. We save Beerwah for puberty or later, it’s tougher.”
Koenig sets his pipe down and reaches for her. “I know it’s not logical for a physicist, of all people, but I have this old-fashioned craving for a simple narrative line. Time curves, it can’t be helped, but I don’t see why plots should.” He pulls her onto
the bed.
“Plots do have to —”
He stops her mouth with a kiss. “Another night,” he says, digressing into touch.
And another night, insistent, she argues: “Plots do have to double back on themselves, there’s no other way. I’ve brought you something, it’s not a digression. Of course the MIT library was no help at all, I had to get it from Widener and I copied it out from the microfiche. Listen. The log of James Cook, captain of His Majesty’s barque Endeavour, entry of May 17, 1770, 5 a.m. Can I read it to you?”
“Mmm,” he murmurs, nuzzling her thigh.
Charade’s body readjusts itself slightly. “Some on board were of opinion that there was a river there …” She glances up over her sheet of paper. “There was. The Brisbane River, which he didn’t see.”
“The Brisbane River, imagine.”
“Beside which river, a couple of centuries later, my mother Bea and my aunt Kay, sitting in the Botanical Gardens —”
“Yes, yes.” Timelines like a tangle of balloon strings cross-hatch the bed. “But if we could just pin down the Glasshouse Mountains.”
She frowns. “I’m trying to do that from Cook’s journal, if you wouldn’t interrupt. Listen.”
This place map always be found by three hills which lie to the northward of it … These hills lie but a little way inland and not far from each other: they are very remarkable on account of their singular form which very much resembles a glass house which occasioned me giving them that name. The northernmost of the three is the highest and the largest.
“That’s Beerwah,” she explains, “which I’ve also climbed. It’s a lot tougher than Tibrogargan. The third one is Coonowrin, but we call it Crookneck. I’ve never climbed Crookneck. It’s as sheer as the Royal Bank tower, just a finger of rock.”
“Though I’m sure your father, the mythical Nicholas —”
She frowns at that. “Do you want to hear Kay’s story or not?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Ah, I’d forgotten which tale we were chasing, but it’s hers and not yours. So. Back in the old Einstein-Bohr game, eh? Back in the K box. Are we in Toronto or Queensland?”
“Question,” Charade says. “If a woman stands in the middle of Massachusetts Avenue facing MIT, but her memory is so vividly snagged on one particular day of her childhood in the village of Le Raincy that she is unaware … that she is oblivious to the cars around her and so is hit, run over, killed … Is she more truly in Boston or in France when she dies?”
“Well put,” Koenig says. “The indeterminacy problem in
a nutshell.”
“Do time and space really exist?” Katherine asks Charade. Or are they, she wonders, like soul and eternity, just clever ideas? Metaphors of explanation. A way of holding things apart in our minds? None of the Charades on the faceted flank of the Royal Bank responds. “Because I stood here last year,” Katherine explains, “here on Front Street, Toronto, with the traffic roaring by, and I naturally thought of that hike up Tibrogargan and of Captain Cook’s journals, why wouldn’t I? And of course I thought of Borges — well, anyone would — the multiplications, the reflections of reflections. And then I saw —”
“Yes,” Koenig interrupts, “memory’s holographic, that’s pretty well established now. Distributed, not localised. Touch any bioelectric splinter and the entire thing can stage a replay.” He holds her hand up to the light. “Vivid as a hologram,” he says, studying her delicate bones and translucent skin. “So there’s no certain way of knowing if this is happening now.” He draws a question mark, lightly, between her breasts. “Or then,” he says.
Charade says archly, “I get better and better in the reruns.”
“Mmmm,” he murmurs as they slide into another intermission.
“As Katherine was saying …” he prompts.
“Ah yes. And then as she was saying by the Royal Bank towers …”
“I saw Nicholas,” Katherine says, “and a sort of mad euphoria hit me.” She laughs uneasily. “He might have sprung straight from the thought of Borges, but I ran full tilt at the …” She watches her twenty heads shaking themselves in disbelief. “I chased his reflection. People must have thought I was crazy.” She rubs her eyes with the back of one hand. “Stupid,” she says. “Stupid.”
“But was he …?” Charade ventures, breathless, watching the Royal Bank watching Front Street. “Was my father …?”
“He was wearing, I remember, a white shirt and jeans. I’d never seen him in jeans. And a cloth hat pulled down over his curls. Well, we’d all been advised … it’s an awfully hot climb … Only his was white, not army surplus like the rest. I remember people were making jokes … Nicholas, seventh Earl of Irregular Verbs, stuff like that.” Katherine looks about her, vaguely startled as cars brake, as horns rise like Canada geese.
“I think,” Charade says urgently, “I think we should find a restaurant and sit down and …”
“The strangest sense,” Katherine says, as a waitress indicates a pine table beneath green and white awnings, “I have the strangest sense of déjà vu.’’
At a pine table beneath a green and white awning which has been temporarily erected, the beer is passed from hand to student hand. Katherine abstains. It seems to her, crowded and deafened by the din of talk and laughter, that she is even more conspicuous than when she stood unwillingly in the Friday night kerbside circle, hemmed in by hymns and megaphones, and listened to Merv Watson lob scripture into the heart of Brisbane. Beyond the rabble of noises, birds call. Only in one sense, she thinks, only in the insignificant corporeal sense, is she present at this rural academic gathering. She pictures herself from a bird’s-eye view, a kind of cipher at the edge of the raucous goodwill, not quite understanding the jokes (Bea-talk and bawdy, she recognises that) and looking longingly up into the scrub and tree shadow. If there were a way to cross the open space of brown grass and dust, a way to disappear into those long green tunnels that slope up to the sun …
Climbing a mountain is as natural to her as breathing. But it is something to be done alone, or in the company of people one knows very well (Bea, for example), people who will not scratch the great surfaces of peace with unnecessary talk.
From time to time, new cars arrive and a fresh spill of people buffets the picnic grounds; fresh voices and jokes reverberate under the green and white awning, oppressing Katherine. She watches for Verity.
Nicholas is already here, Katherine has been aware of this from the moment she arrived, though she can no more look at him than one can look at the sun. Except obliquely. She is aware, certainly, most vividly aware of his white shirt half unbuttoned. There is some disturbing quality to it, an incongruous note of refinement but also something faintly erotic, set over against all the bright and loud T-shirts, the cotton checks. It is difficult to see Nicholas clearly. Satellites of students, mostly girls, moon about him in a constant cloudy circle.
There is no indication that Nicholas is aware of Katherine’s presence, no reason to believe he remembers that he “insisted” she come. Studying him from the edges of her mind, watching him laugh, watching him sip beer from a glass proffered by a girl whose shining body gives off sexual invitation, Katherine wonders: Does he think of Verity at times such as these? Is he watching for
her? Does he think of Bea? What categories exist in his mind?
She looks again at the open space between the picnic tables and the treeline at the foot of Tibrogargan. In her mind, she gets up casually and crosses to the trees and disappears up the slope into the scrub. In her mind she rehearses: the shifting of weight, her footsteps on dry leaves, the embrace of shadow. It should be possible. Would anyone notice?
When Verity arrives, it will become simple. They will climb together. Probably.
Casually, sliding the question like an illicit billet doux underneath the convivial hubbub, Katherine asks a fellow student from Verity’s tutorial: “Is ah is Verity here yet?” — knowing the answer, but looking about indifferently as though for something temporarily mislaid. “I don’t think I’ve seen her.”
The student raises an eyebrow. “Are you serious?”
“What do you mean?”
“Ashkenazy? She never comes on these things. She’s practically a recluse, I thought everyone knew that. Bit of an idiot savant, if you know what I mean.” The girl taps her forehead significantly: “I’ve known her from way back. You know what I think?” She leans toward Katherine and lowers her voice behind her bottle of Four-X beer. “I think she’s got Nicholas by the balls. If you watch him — even when she’s not here — you’ll see her tug on the leash every now and then. He’s all tied up, worse luck.”
Katherine thinks: If Bea heard this? Suppose I were to drop by the Duke of Wellington and mention, casually … “Just gossip, the sort of nonsense one hears around … But he’s all tied up, in popular opinion.”
And not by Bea.
The girl persists, holding her bottle of beer like a shield in front of her lips to indicate the confidential nature of her information. “She’s got some kind of hold on him, there’s something sick about it. Frankly, she gives me the creeps. She’s … stuck up, don’t you think? And cold as a fish. Frigid, I’m willing to bet.”
Katherine wonders if intensity of wishing could collapse the distance between the picnic table and the foot of Tibrogargan.
I will count to ten, she thinks, and then I will give myself a slight push with my hands against the picnic bench and then I will be standing and it will be logical to saunter off in the direction of …
“What do you think?” the girl persists.
“Ah …” Katherine hedges, turning her hands up to indicate her lack of competence in the topic under discussion.
“But you must have some opinion,” the girl says. “Everyone knows you’re her protégée.”
Katherine’s eyebrows buckle with surprise. “I am? But we only … it’s purely …” She is casting about in her mind for the girl’s name. Doesn’t it start with M? It’s not Mary, not Maureen. She’s someone who is vocal in seminars, a rather witty debunking anti-intellectual presence, a sort of devil’s advocate for Philistines. Sometimes Katherine has sensed a fizzing antagonism toward Verity; at other times she has felt the girl is desperate to get Verity’s attention. Katherine herself cannot bear to hear criticism of someone who … well, who is simply beyond the normal categories of assessment. She says awkwardly, clearing her throat. “About Verity … the war, you know.”
“Oh, bugger that,” the girl says irritably. (Margaret? Miriam? Myra, that’s it.) “You’re not going to trot out that old story about her parents, surely?” Myra sniffs. “Believe me, I’ve known her for donkey’s years. Even if it’s true, big deal. Hell, my dad’s a TPI, left a leg in New Guinea and gets the shivers twice a week. Doesn’t have to turn you into a bloody —”
“Okay,” someone shouts. “Firewood time. We want dry brush and pinecones. If everyone brings …” — and in the general mêlée and dispersal which follow, Katherine finds herself — oh blessed confusing movement — on the far side of the curtain of scrub and ti-tree. She breathes in the sweet harsh smell of Tibrogargan. She climbs, the picnic falling away from her ankles like moulting feathers.
Stones clatter from her feet and ring like little bells against the plates of rock. She listens to them pinging and bouncing, echoing faintly far down, a measurement of freedom. Once or twice her canvas shoes slide suddenly from under her legs, the gravel giving way, and she clutches at tufts of spiky brown grass. Along her forearm, beads of blood appear against white scratch marks. She climbs quickly.
Verity is wrong not to come, she thinks. No. Not wrong to stay away from the group, but wrong to lock her life up inside a library; wrong not to climb the mountain alone, or with Nicholas, or with me. Between the sun and the side of a mountain, there is no room for the past; it vanishes. Life is just this. She turns to look out over the scrub below and flings her arms up toward the sky in an intense spasm of pleasure. If she were to take a dance step out into space, she believes the air would support her.
This is the way it is for Bea all the time, she thinks. The knowledge comes to her like heat through the pores of her skin. In a slight dizziness — from the sun or the swooping drop to the valley floor — she turns back to the flank of the mountain. Ahead and above is a long stretch of rock, dimpled, hot to the fingers, treeless. She finds a ledge and sits and leans back; she can feel the mountain breathing like a heart against her spine. She pushes up the sleeves of her blouse and rolls her jeans up past her knees and turns her face, eyes closed, to the sun. There will never be words for this, she thinks. It will never need words.
She has a sense of herself as a solar whiteness, without shape, without limits in space or time, pulsing with a kind of exaltation whose only analogue might be the dramatic rush of wind at the rainy edge of a cyclone.
If Verity were to climb the Glasshouses, she thinks, her past would become different. The life of Verity-on-the-mountain would have another history altogether.
But is it possible for Verity to climb the Glasshouses?
Might there not, in fact, be planes and spheres and tales which can never intersect?
It strikes Katherine that it might indeed be as impossible for Verity to climb Tibrogargan as for the Wanderer or Beowulf to sail their curved ships up inside the Barrier Reef. Is a sense of the tragic possible along a tropical coast? Can it be maintained? Does it have to be imported from Europe?
Energy — from the sun, or from the heady rush of her ideas — pushes her on and up, over the dimpled rocks. Yes, she thinks, both sombre and excited, as though thorny literary problems are solving themselves at last. Verity will always live in Le Raincy, the Wanderer will always sail the North Sea, they can’t be translated. But they endure in their original tongues. They endure.
Trees overshadow her again, a brown stand of gums fingering the rock. Beneath them the underbrush flourishes, and where a trickle of water drips out from between rocks and collects in a hollow, ferns grow thick and deep. It is possible, Katherine thinks, that no one has stepped into that greenness since the world began. From here, looking back, she can see the striped awning and toy people moving around it, and a row like ants threading its way up into the mountain. Above the tattered leaves there is nothing but sky and King Sun. She feels absolutely insignificant and absolutely omnipotent, immortal even, at one and the same time. Hubris moves through the ferns like a kingfisher, she feels the quick little brush of its wings. She tests her power: standing deep in the pool of curling fronds, she closes her eyes and summons up his white shirt, open over brown skin, his cloth hat, the butter-pale curls. She makes a wish: Nicholas.
“Katherine?”
She swallows and opens her eyes, but it is only the girl from her poetry tutorial, Myra — definitely, yes, that is her name — asking: “Why the hell did you take off like that? Whew.” Myra wipes her sweating forehead with the cloth hat. “We might as well sit and rest a bit, while we wait for the others to catch up.” She throws herself down into the ferns, wriggles a little to gain comfort against twigs and ants, and pulls a bottle opener and a Four-X from her knapsack. She seems to fill the entire space beneath the trees; the deep and endless pool of ferns has dwindled to leprous tufts. She flips the top off a bottle and takes a mouthful. “Yech. Warm bloody beer,” she says. “Already.” Nevertheless she continues to drink, then holds the bottle out toward Katherine whose mind, in slow motion, considers its response. She shakes her head, changes her mind, accepts it as though in a dream.
Myra raises an eyebrow. “The thing about you,” she offers thoughtfully, “is you always just do whatever you decide to do, right? I mean, you don’t care what anyone thinks, do you? Like just taking off up the track, back then.”
Katherine stares, amazed, the bottle poised on the way to her lips. Logically, she thinks, I could be as wildly blind about her. Myra laces her hands behind her head and leans back into the ferns. “So how do you do it?” she asks comfortably. “What’s the secret? You snap your fingers, so to speak, and Ashkenazy waits for your opinion in the tutorial. Or I have to come chasing you up the mountain. Or Nicholas the Dreamboat himself has to keep sneaking looks in your direction.”
Katherine has the eerie sensation of having taken a wrong turn in a theatre: she has wandered on stage in the middle of a production and now — this is surely an off-kilter dream — both players and audience turn expectantly toward her. But what are her lines?
Myra laughs. “Well, it’s certainly not the magic power of your voice, since you’re practically mute. Outside seminars, that is. Is that the secret? Why do I have the feeling that you sent for me?” She claps her hands, sits up and bends forward from the waist, a mock genie. “What do you want to know?”
Katherine smiles uncertainly and lifts her shoulders slightly to imply: I’m out of my depth. I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s nothing I want to know. There are definitely, in fact, many things I do not want to know.
“Funny,” Myra says, rolling over onto her stomach and propping her chin in her hands, “the way everyone has this compulsion to talk about them all the time, isn’t it? I guess it’s the waste that drives us all crazy. What does he see in her? — apart from the obvious, I mean. Of course she is beautiful, you have to concede that, though it’s just her face really, isn’t it? None of the other standard attributes that we are all led to believe …. But it’s not as though he’s blind to it elsewhere. Let’s face it, as one fallen woman to another, you’ve got to search a long time to find someone who hasn’t at least necked with Nicholas. Damned if I know why we let him get away with it.” She stretches like a cat, purrs, licks the slow circle of her lips with a tongue indulging in memory. “Well, of course I know why,” she sighs. “What I mean is, why do we let her do it? Just a twitch on the leash, and whoosh, he’s miles away, even when you’ve still got him between your legs in the back of a car. Just what’s she got that we haven’t?”
For some reason, in the midst of the sensation of inner lurch (the kind of free fall that dreams can open into) Katherine thinks of Gene the Sailorman at the moment when he turns away to lunge for Bea’s sandal.
“There’s something manipulative about her,” Myra says. “Always has been. I’ve known her for ages. Same school.”
Is it possible, Katherine wonders, to go on and on, day after day, making the discovery that you are even more of a fool than you thought you were yesterday? She asks herself savagely: Does he carve notches on a gatepost somewhere?
“You know how I know?” Myra asks. “The way she had to have teachers eating out of her hand. Every grade, these so-called brilliant essays — about her tragic bloody past, ho hum — but one year the teachers compared, and all the stories were different. It was kind of a joke around All Hallows.”
“All Hallows?”
“Yep. Ahead of me, of course, by a good few years, but the stories were still around. And I remember her, sort of. The version that gets me is the parents bombed in the London blitz and all that jazz. She’s no more a Pom than I am, and that accent wouldn’t fool —”
“Of course she’s not a Pom,” Katherine says primly. “She’s French and Jewish.”
“What?” Myra hugs herself and rolls in the ferns. “French! Oh that’s a good one, I hadn’t heard that one. And the Jewish kick: well, that started up in grade twelve, I believe. Before that she had a vocation. The nuns lapped her up, of course, bless their dear little suffering-loving souls. It’s a miracle she didn’t break out in stigmata.”
Katherine thinks: I have a lunatic on my hands. “Myra,” she says patiently. “Think about it. With a name like Ashkenazy.”
“Exactly. How come her parents used to be just plain Mick and Thelma Delaney, before her father made a killing on the horses? Believe me, Katherine, my dad used to know Mick Delaney, and he reckons — my dad, that is — that her ladyship was born two blocks away from the Banyo railway station. She was baptised a Mick, and her dad used to drive a truck for Tristram’s Drinks.”
“Myra? How can you say these things?”
“How? Because my dad used to drink with Mick Delaney at the RSL, that’s how. They were both at Tobruk, which is the closest Miss High-and-Mighty ever got to France, if you ask me. Hey, here come the slowpokes, they’ve caught up with us. And Jenny Williamson — all over Nicholas still, I see. She thinks she’s hit the jackpot, silly fool.”
“I suppose, Charade,” Katherine muses, “that we merged in with the group and got to the top of Tibrogargan.”
Because yes, Katherine remembers how the sweeping view across the Bruce Highway to Bribie Island and the endless Pacific has a bright white flag in one corner: the shirt of Nicholas, open at the neck; the sun on his wheat-pale curls. And she recalls how she pondered the nature of obsession, and the mysterious ways in which we invest objects with power and then wait like vultures for demythologising to set in.
“Though that process is never complete,” she tells Charade. “Never. I’m convinced of that now. What still mystifies me is how it comes about that we confer significance in the first place, and then it clings. Totemic objects can never totally lose their power, not for all the demythologising in the world. Because whenever I think of the Pacific, there’s a white sail on it that turns into Nicholas’s shirt. And whenever I think of the Glasshouses … Which is why, I suppose, by quick train of association, I saw him on the side of the Royal Bank.” She frowns and looks uncertainly along Front Street from under the brightly striped awning. “But the curious thing was … Well, I’ll get back to that later. First things first.”
Or last things last. Because it is when the group is dispersing again, as dusk falls on the picnic grounds, that Nicholas, shoving a canvas roll of green and white into the back of a van, reaches out and tugs on Katherine’s sleeve. “Want to ride back with me in the van?” he asks.
Katherine has many versions of what happened after this. She would like to think that she politely detached his hand and said something like “Thank you, but I came up in Myra’s car and I’ve already told her …” She would like to think she then calmly turned and walked away. She does believe, in all the versions, that she turned a corner that day and began to walk away from her obsession.
But also in all the versions is a certain amount of smoke and mist, and the thudding of her heartbeat, and the clear haunting notes of a recorder. And from somewhere in that time is the knowledge of Nicholas’s body, of the star-shaped mole in the hollow of his neck, of his lips on hers, of their legs intertwined — and when could it have been, if not that night? Unless of course it was a few months later, when she was off in north Queensland teaching in a country high school and Nicholas, incredibly, blew into town. Or unless it was the time after that, her twenty-first birthday, when she woke from a dream of him and there he was again on her doorstep.
Yes, that was real. That really happened.
“Happy birthday,” he said. “I thought perhaps a trip to the Garden of Eden?” And on that occasion they took the boat out from Cairns to Green Island where the coral bloomed and where passionfruit lay rotting under the trees. Was that when they finally made love? Because they did. Once. And it would have been, she’d always felt, such a terrible waste of location if the fall hadn’t taken place on Green Island. So they slept on the white sand and a snake sunned itself on a rock and she fed Nicholas pomegranates and mangoes and custard apples.
All of which happened, in one sense, only seconds ago: so she knows as she crosses Front Street in Toronto about twenty-three years later and sees a certain reflection, and rushes, heedless of cars and pedestrians, full tilt at the mirrored flank of the Royal Bank.