As Far as You Can Go (12 page)

The first she knows is a hard kiss on her mouth, so lacking in tenderness, so
unlike
him, that for a moment she thinks it must be somebody else. But it is his face, the chin bristly, the breath hot with wine and meat.

‘Hey,’ she grumbles, ‘I’m asleep.’

But he doesn’t stop kissing and in the candlelight his eyes look blind. He fumbles at her breasts, jams a knee between her legs, forcing them apart.

‘Hey?’ she says and tries to pull away but finds herself unwillingly turned on. He’s never like this, it’s weirdly exciting. She puts up a mild struggle but he forces himself inside her, sore and tight. He’s hardly in before he finishes, groans and rolls off. And that, it seems, is that.

She lies staring at the ceiling, waiting for him to speak, but he says nothing.

‘How was it for you?’ she says after a minute.

He mumbles something. Maybe sorry? She gets up, the insides of her thighs warm and tacky.

‘You bastard,’ she says half-heartedly. She pulls on her dressing gown and goes outside to wash. The sky is sequinned above her, preposterously bright. She stares upwards, all those wonky stars and the cloudy swathe of the Milky Way. When she gets back in he’s asleep, lashes casting angelic shadows on his cheeks in the candlelight. She stares at him. Did that really happen? Asleep and breathing evenly, like a child. She thinks to kick him awake, turn him out of bed, make him sleep in his bloody studio.

But it is
Graham
. And she is tired. And doesn’t want to be alone. She puffs out the candle, climbs back beside him, rolling unwillingly close against his hot skin. The starlight prickles through the thin curtains. Between her teeth the threads of meat begin to taste of rot.

Dear Mum and Dad
,

You’ll be surprised to hear from me. I am surprised to be writing to you. I’m in Western Australia with my girlfriend on a kind of disused sheep station. I’ve come here to paint
.

I

Alone in the kitchen, Cassie slices onions and weeps. Weeping because this morning she broke her mirror. Just knocked it flying. She picked it up but the glass was cracked, still in place but cracked into maybe twenty pieces, curved and geometric shards that reflected her face in bits like something by Picasso. She can get new glass, of course, when she gets home, but it won’t be the same glass that reflected her grandma. Cassie remembers Grandma holding it up so that she could check the back of her hair, in her dressing-table mirror. New glass will not be the same. She didn’t cry when she smashed it. Maybe the sting of the onions has set her off.

And maybe it is tiredness too. Couldn’t sleep last night. Graham’s peaceful sleeping breath. She’d lit the candle and watched his cheeks ballooning with air and then his lips opening with a soft
puck
on every exhalation. She’d tried to think about the garden. If they could start a pond and have frogs then the frogs would eat the bugs. She’d wondered if there were any indigenous frogs in this dry place, must ask Larry. She tips the onion skins into the new compost bucket (how will she ever stop it swarming with flies?), pours oil into a pan, slides it on to the hot plate.

She wipes her eyes and turns at the sound of the door opening, hoping it is Graham – he was up and out early this
morning so there has been no chance to talk. And he never gets up before her. Up and out early to make damn sure there was no chance to talk. At least he can’t escape for long. Not here.

But it’s not Graham, it’s Mara, stark naked except for a pair of men’s boots, laces trailing.

‘What’s up?’ Mara says.

‘Nothing.’ Cassie wipes the back of her hand across her face, smearing tears with salt sweat. She half smiles, wondering if Mara is aware of her nakedness. She seems completely unabashed. Cassie doesn’t know where to look.

‘What are you making?’ Mara asks.

‘I normally start frying onions then I decide.’

‘Use up the poor kangaroo?’

‘Roo Stew?’ Cassie wrinkles her nose. A speciality in
Cassie’s Outback Kitchen?

‘Fred adores stews.’ Mara pulls up a stool and sits down, her heavy breasts resting on the table like a couple of seal pups. It’s hard not to stare. The breasts are fine, at least supported by the table like that, the skin smooth and plump, years younger than that on her neck and face.

‘Larry says you haven’t been well –’

‘Not well! I am a danger to man and beast! What has he said? Larry?’ Mara grabs Cassie’s hand and pulls her near. ‘What has he said about me?’

‘Nothing, he only says –’ but Cassie’s mind has gone blank. She’s distracted by Mara’s nipples gazing at her like calm brown eyes. The hand squeezes. She can’t remember quite what Larry said or implied. ‘Something like you needed peace and quiet – that you are –’ The word ‘delicate’ comes to mind but that is the last word for this broad, brown woman in boots. ‘That you like your own space,’ she tries and Mara releases her hand.

‘My own space. Well, that’s right.’

‘He’s obviously devoted to you.’

‘We are a devoted couple,’ Mara says. But the way she says it – Cassie frowns. ‘I’m not stupid you know,’ Mara continues, fiercely.

‘I can see you’re not. Larry says you’re brilliant,’ she improvises.

‘He says that?’ Mara’s face opens with pleasure. ‘Brilliant people – they must be sensitive. The world does hurt so.’

Cassie picks at a speck of something on the table.
The world?

Mara gives a sudden cavernous yawn, stretching her arms up so that her breasts lift, so that Cassie glimpses the wet red at the back of her throat. She turns away and slides the onion slices into the pan of swimmy golden oil. The sizzle is immediate, electric, sweet.

‘Fred now,’ Mara says. ‘What do you make of Fred?’

‘Seems nice enough.’

Cassie gets the remains of the meat out of the refrigerator. She puts it on a wooden board and saws through its sinews with a knife. Blood oozes into the grooves on the wooden board. She holds her breath against the smell and the memory of the thick clump against the bottom of the car as they’d hit a carcass in the road on the way.

‘Oh, Fred.’ Mara smiles and shakes her head. ‘Care for an anchovy?’ She goes into the larder. The shape of the chair seat is printed on her wide and dimpled bottom. Her hair is in a thick plait down her back, the tail of it reaching into the groove between her buttocks.

‘Not for me.’ Cassie hacks the meat into rough chunks, shoves it into the pan and rinses the wooden board and knife under the tap quickly to rid them of the blood. The frying pan makes a deeper sound, the blood instantly killed, turning to sticky brown.

‘I adore anchovies,’ Mara says. ‘But I can’t open the flipping tin.’

Cassie takes it and unpeels the top with its fiddly key. Mara
sticks her fingers in and lifts out a couple of bristly fillets. Dripping oil, she puts her head back, opens her mouth and pops them in. Cassie smiles, thinking seals again. Mara’s eyes close as she relishes them.

‘Anything salty,’ she says, ‘but anchovies especially. Anchovy paste now. That on toast.’ She sighs.

‘Never tried it,’ Cassie says. ‘Have we got some?’
A spoonful of anchovy paste adds an intriguing dash of flavour
. A drop of fish-flecked oil slithers into the gully between Mara’s breasts.

‘Yes. Larry loves Gentleman’s Relish.
Peperium
. What a word.’

Cassie hears a noise outside – maybe Graham. She starts: what if he walks in with Mara stark – but it is only the dog nosing his way round the flyscreen.

‘Yella,’ Mara says and the dog jams its nose into her crutch. Cassie looks away. Graham’s bound to come in, sooner or later.

‘Mara,’ she says, waving her hand vaguely, ‘you are –’

‘What? Oh, you mean
me
. Get off.’ She pushes the dog away and he humphs and curls up under the table. ‘Don’t believe in clothes,’ Mara says. That’s why we live here, partly. Heard of naturism? Didn’t go down well in Lewes – but here –’

‘Naturism? Oh. But Larry –’

Mara holds her belly and bends over in a fit of mirth. ‘It’s not Larry’s … cup of tea.’ She straightens up. ‘Without his clothes he would be … insignificant and we can’t have that!’ Her eyes sparkle with mischief. ‘And he makes
me
cover up in company. But you’re not company any more, are you? You’re part of it and he pays you.’

‘Hmmm.’

‘Worrying about your man?’ Mara laughs and sucks a finger.

‘Might make him uneasy though, don’t you think?’

‘Does it make you uneasy?’

‘To tell the truth – well, a bit. We’re just not used –’

‘But you’ll soon
get
used. You could take yours off too.’

Cassie hesitates, then giggles, imagining Graham’s face if he was to walk in on the two of them naked in the haze of fried onions.

‘The others, they never got used –’

‘The others?’

‘You look like her.’

‘Who?’

‘Lucy. Anyway, Larry’s not here. Just me. It’s only me – and Graham – and he’s seen you, hasn’t he? He knows you, inside out.’

‘Lucy?’

But Mara shakes her head.

Cassie moves the pan away from the heat, the meat is cooking too fast. It will be tough as Mara’s old boots. Probably should have marinaded it. ‘Anyway, where
is
Larry? Do you think he’d mind if I opened some wine, for the stew?’

‘Doubt it. He went off with Fred. Didn’t he say?
See
, now you’re here, he’s got the freedom. To come and go.’

‘But where?’ Cassie stares at her. ‘I’m cooking all this stew.’

Mara shrugs. ‘I could eat a horse,’ she says. ‘Maybe I’ll have an egg to be going on with.’

*

Graham’s head is thick, brains curdled with sun and dust. The scale is impossible. The light makes no shadows and even where there is shadow there is no
moulding
. It is all too big. He is helpless in it. The ridges of hills they flew over he understands now as like the ripples of sand left on a beach after a choppy tide – but immense, gargantuan. He stands insect-like, a speck under the steady pulse of the sun, lost in the vast spaces between the dry ripples. There is no clear place to start.

He’ll head back instead. Face the music. In the early morning,
feeling ridiculous, grinning to himself at the absurdity, he had left a trail of objects as he walked out – to guide himself back. But it proves not to be absurd because he sets off back in the wrong direction. There’s something that confuses him every time. Maybe the sun’s in the wrong place? The other side of the sky? You might think you don’t notice where the sun is but if it’s on the wrong side, in the wrong hemisphere, it disturbs something in the brain. You are disorientated on some level you didn’t know you had.

He walks back, the way that feels the wrong way and finds the first object: a matchbox. He heads off now with confidence, picking up a pencil, a book, toothpaste (that has split its minty chalk into the red dust), and a couple of beer bottles, till he begins to recognise the lie of the land, that stand of gums then the eye-stinging glint of sun on a tin roof. His mouth is dry, head wet under his hat. A crow mocks him with its Siamese cat’s cry, hopping and dragging its tail feathers, flapping heavily upwards and landing in the dust beside him as he follows his trail. The bird with its dirty carrion beak and its knowing eye makes him feel sick or maybe it is just the sun.

He’s hung over. He wants Cassie, longs with sudden fierceness for her northern arms around him, for the something cool that she retains. But she’ll be mad still about last night. It isn’t him at all, to act like that. And then to fall straight asleep! He simply, momentarily, wasn’t himself. Almost literally. Yet he can imagine what she’d say if offered that as an excuse.

He smells cooking from miles away, approaches, hears women’s voices in the kitchen. Something comforting about that. Something ordinary. He pauses outside, takes off his sweaty hat. Inside, it takes a moment for his eyes to focus on Mara’s skin. Broad back, swell of hips, sturdy legs in boots. Cassie’s eyes meet his over Mara’s shoulder.

‘Something smells good,’ he says, voice coming out a bit high.

‘It’s me,’ Mara says, turning, massive tits shoogling about with laughter.

‘Roo stew,’ Cassie says.

He goes to the fridge, opens the door and stands with his front in the cold waft of stale air. ‘Beer?’ he offers.

‘Let’s all have a beer,’ Mara suggests.

‘Should you?’ Cassie says.

‘Yes.’

He sits down, stares at the mess on the table, eggshells, crusts, a sticky anchovy tin with, of course, a fly dragging its legs in the pooled oil. Big nipples, tiny black hairs like spiders’ legs –

He opens three bottles and presses the chilled glass of one against his cheek, gulps it down, the beer so cold and prickly it almost hurts. Mara passes him, her breasts swaying inches from his face and sits down. Her skin is every shade of caramel brown. Cassie is watching him so he can’t look. Can’t think of a thing to say. The ceiling fan turns above, stirring the hot shimmery smell of cooking. He feels that he might choke.

‘Where is it?’ Mara asks.

‘Sorry?’

‘What you’ve done.’

‘Not today. You know how it is.’

Mara laughs again, a cascading jiggle of flesh. ‘You’re embarrassed. By me. It will rub off.’

Graham stands up. He forces himself to look squarely at Mara before he leaves the room. The lines of her. To look at her as a thing, an object in space. Taking in all of her he can see at the table, the overlap of flesh at the seat of the chair, the brown shin with its straight black hairs disappearing into a flap of boot, the shoelace coiled like a query on the floor. He looks up at the large breasts, the kind of breasts you could cast yourself upon and weep. Cassie’s eyes are on him, watching him look. He can’t look at her.

He goes out. The cold bottle already heating in his hand. He
stumbles over hens round to the shearers’ shed, runs the tap, sloshes his face with tepid water. He takes off his shirt and splashes his chest and neck. He picks up the soap and tries to make a lather with the briny water, not much of a lather but still it smells childishly of coal tar.