From town I took another bus, a country-bound bus, square and slow. Full of mailbags and chicken crates, it went out through the surrounding bush townships in the early morning and came back in the late evening. The driver was young and greasy. I thought he must be English. He wore his hair in a beautifully oiled duck’s tail; it must have left dreadful marks on his pillow or wherever he kept his head. He wore a purple suit and blue suede shoes. A large Japanese transistor radio balanced on top of his dashboard. It crashed against the windscreen at every hole in the road and was never quite on the station, but gave a pleasant blurred effect with occasional blasts of static. That bus had atmosphere. Today it also had a team of lady bowlers, who were off to an away match at a country ground. They were arranged two-by-two along one side of the bus, exchanging pleasantries and egg sandwiches, their starched white dresses and uniform hats giving off static of their own. Their bright enamel club badges glittered and flashed victoriously in the sun; their stringy brown calves rippled healthily above sterile white socks. The bus had a clinical air this morning; in contrast the driver looked dirtier than ever. The newspapers and loaves of sliced white bread in their waxy red-and-white wrappings were loaded into the back.
We moved off, creaky and overloaded, crawling through the suburbs to where the thin stream of weatherboard houses trickled out into a pool of rusting car bodies, rotting mattresses and ragged-edged beer cans. The telegraph poles continued, pulling themselves out of the tangled mess of the town into a taut straight line and marching purposefully ahead from horizon to horizon, ignoring geography and natural obstacles and playing tricks with perspective.
First off were the lady bowlers. They disembarked just past the airport and disappeared into a little wooden clubhouse by the roadside. We drove on, round scrubby hills, blue-green and smooth at a distance, coarse-grassed and rocky up close. Dotted on these hills were little trees with rounded tops: toffee-apple trees from nursery wallpaper. Overhead the high bright blue sky was stretched tight and shiny between pink-tinged clouds. The road ahead was a shoelace of white dust. The colours were primary, hard-edged, acrylic-clear. I scraped myself, in my bus shell, across the perfect clarity and colour of that day—a bag of white skin full of passionate reds and purples and boiling yellow-green jealousies. If the bag split, those colours would spill out and spoil the scenery. But it didn’t. There was no bursting with happiness. Or anything else.
As the bus lurched round the next corner I saw Ben waiting. He was waiting for his mail, he said. He had a lot of friends overseas, and their pale blue letters filled his canvas mailbag and his life with interest.
Once Ben had tried living overseas. He took his wife and son and went by boat to England: to a small dingy room in London, where the rat aspects and dirt of big-city life got him down. So they moved to a small provincial city in the Midlands, where they rented the last house in a long row of grey terraced houses. Some claimed that it was the longest terrace in England; later the National Trust put a preservation order on it. The end house, his house, ended in a blind brick wall facing bleak countryside. During the first week there he borrowed a ladder and painted his wall with a bright tropical landscape, and it became a local landmark. A man from the Sunday Times came and took a photograph of it, and it was reproduced in the colour supplement as an example of urban street art. Someone cut it out and sent it to him, and he pinned it on his workroom wall. It hung there now, fly-spotted and brittle-yellow with summer heat.
Through his back windows Ben had been able to see nothing but ploughed fields, in which, it seemed, nothing was ever planted or grew. In winter, snow fell and it was white and silent all round for miles—except for his incongruously glowing tropical landscape. It was so glittering and pure and clean that his nerve broke. One evening, after picking a quarrel and breaking all the windows, he ran away, back to London, where he spent ten grey days, worrying his wife sick as she waited it out in that cold English landscape burning his pictures to keep his son alive and warm. So he had nothing to show for it. A wasted trip.
I knew of this, not from him, but from Gloria. We sat together one day by a dried-up summer creek; she with a shoebox of photographs to show me: mementoes of the trip. To make the most of it, they had taken the long way home, through Europe and various other bits of the world. She showed me a photograph of herself with son in arms on top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
‘That’s where I had decided to commit suicide. I was going to jump—I would have put the boy down first, of course—but Ben stopped me. I think people who try to stop other people killing themselves are boring. And stupid.’
She placed the lid back on the shoebox and told me the story of their trip. Her face in shadow under her large sun hat, all the snow and ice and the miserable solitude that she described seemed safely at a distance—a vast distance. I smiled and held her hand as we walked slowly back to the house. I hoped that she felt safe in her hot land.
I saw Ben waiting for the bus, the mail and, it being Thursday, me. The bus pulled up at his feet. The dancing dust surrounded him in a cloud. He was wearing a long black djebella and sandals—a misplaced Arab…
I got off the bus, and Ben collected his mail. We went to the house, an old colonial farmhouse, beautiful and battered. There was a great deal of land attached to it, but Ben didn’t farm the property. It belonged to his sister, and he let bits of it to a neighbouring farmer to graze sheep, while the other bits he left to nature. A creek ran roughly through the middle. In summer it was a canyon with steep, hard, red-earth sides and a few slimy puddles at the bottom; in rainy seasons it flooded. He had channelled some of this creek water into a pond, where he kept ducks for his own amusement.
We walked around the house to the back door, which led across a small wooden porch straight into the kitchen. There we made tea, and then we sat at the large pine table and rolled cigarettes and smoked them, gazing thoughtfully into each other’s eyes. We wondered why I had come.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Good morning. Let’s go.’
We went through to the bedroom. It contained twin beds. Once I had taken this to be a sign—a bad marriage: all was not right in the bedroom—where all the problems start, my mother said. But this time my mother and I were wrong. He told me how it was.
‘When you sleep together you naturally cuddle up, right? Nice and cosy. Mmmmmm. Why not? Well, what happens is, it drains you off. All that touching gets to blunt the edges. So you don’t want to fuck so much. Right?’
‘Right.’ He was making speeches. Leaving clues for me to go over later.
‘This way is better. You go to bed together for one reason. When you really want to. It’s good. Very sharp. You have the best times when you feel like that.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. You should try it. Or maybe you wouldn’t like it. Too straightforward for you. You’re too bloody evasive. So soft.’ He said it like a long word, smiling all the way through. ‘Soft at the edges, but hard as rocks somewhere in there. Very nasty.’
‘Put your glasses on,’ he said, ‘and get what you fancy out of the trunk. A bit of old velvet might be nice.’ He went to his bed and pulled it out from the wall into the middle of the room. I took my clothes off. It was terribly hot in there. The windows, blistered shut in some past heat, wouldn’t open. Ben climbed over his bed and disappeared. His head reappeared on the far side and spoke. ‘There’s some new stuff we can try today. A beaut little number I picked up in the Salvation Army shop in North Hobart.’ He vanished again.
I went over to the old trunk in the corner of the room and searched through it for something interesting.
This trunk was Gloria’s pride and joy, her family heirloom, which she seemed to love out of all proportion. It was only a load of old clothes after all. Once upon a time, she told me, it had contained some bits of old cranberry glass, a Bible and the family silver, as well as old clothes. Gloria’s mother had disposed of the valuables years ago, but Gloria didn’t care: she liked the clothes best. She was fond of describing their romantic history: how her great-grandmother had lugged the trunk out from the old country long ago, in the days of sail, packed full of her best things and lengths of silk, velvet, lace and several pairs of little white gloves which the old lady had supposed it would be hard to lay hands on in the Antipodes.
Gloria regularly dosed the trunk with mothballs and lamented the damage done by silverfish. Ben and I started playing with this stuff one day, a few dressing-up games that just lately had got a bit out of hand. Ben had developed what I considered sometimes to be an unhealthy interest in old clothes.
‘Here, try these on,’ instructed Ben from behind his bed. His latest purchases rose into the air, somersaulted over the bed and crumpled in heaps at my feet.
Ben stood up and dusted himself down. He shoved his bed back against the wall to cover the loose floorboards. He kept his bundles of secondhand clothes in plastic sacks in the space between the floorboards and the foundations: his dressing-up clothes, the stuff of fantasy, chosen for their colour, their texture, the way they felt on the skin.
Gathering up armfuls, we went into his workroom, a glassed-in verandah along two sides of the house. We made a soft, shifting, multicoloured mountain in the middle of the room.
Alone with the heap of beautiful things in the silence—the silence that comes from being enclosed in thick sunlight. It insulated us like thick golden cottonwool. It kept out air; it kept out sound. It kept us isolated and secret. It was too thick to penetrate the glass; it wrapped itself round the house. We were playing in a private golden ball.
We played with our pretty mountain. We chose the pieces of material and clothing we needed. We needed them to act charades—the Victorian parlour-game kind: choose a word, act each syllable and then do the whole word. We took it in turns: one-man shows. Sometimes it was very funny, and we laughed a lot. Sometimes it was very sad, and we made ourselves cry. Occasionally we would be drawn into frightened fantasies. He would twist my arms, give me Chinese burns, whip me with his plastic belt bought in New York, rub me between the legs with his choicest materials, take polaroids of my reactions, stride about in Chelsea Cobbler cowboy boots—Kings Road souvenirs—masturbate into a faded pink velour Victorian remnant. Colourful times. Hot days. We ended asleep, buried in clothes drifts.
