As Far as You Can Go (14 page)

*

Candles flicker on the table and the veranda rails. A moth bats against the pale globe of the kerosene lamp suspended over the table. Each pause in the conversation is filled with the dim flutter of flaking velvet wings.

The food is finished, red smears left on plates. Larry fills the wine glasses again. No one refuses, though they have all had far too much. Cassie picks up her glass immediately and sips. It’s spicy, dark, she doesn’t care what. Perfect with the stew, Larry said. So glad he liked it. So glad when he and Fred came back. Now she needn’t worry about Mara. Cigarette smoke rises and gathers under the veranda roof. It’s cool enough for even Mara to have a shawl around her shoulders.

It’s late. Time to be in bed but first there’s the table to clear and all these dishes. She can’t summon the energy so she sips her wine instead. Graham and Fred are deep in conversation about some artist.

‘Let’s have a tune, Fred,’ Larry interrupts.

‘Yes, yes.’ Mara claps her hands.

‘Graham, I believe you play the mouth organ,’ Larry says.

Graham’s hair is loose about his face, hiding his expression. ‘Blues harp, yeah, sometimes.’

Fred goes off to fetch the guitar from the shearers’ shed and Graham gets up and follows. Cassie clears some of the plates. Larry comes into the kitchen with the salad bowl. ‘Everything all right?’ he asks. ‘I thought you looked a little –’ He looks at her intently. ‘I hope you’re not sad?’

Cassie shakes her head. He looks so awkward, ill at ease with feelings. Nice of him to notice though. Nice of him to care. ‘Just a bit homesick, maybe,’ she says.

‘Well, that’s natural.’

‘No one to – you know,
talk
to. I miss Patsy.’

‘Naturally. I know it’s not the same, but you can always talk to me, you know.’

Graham comes in, slapping his harmonica against his palm. ‘Some crud in this,’ he says, looking in surprise at Larry, who steps back from Cassie as if he’d been too close.

‘Poor Cassie, been telling me she’s homesick,’ he says.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Not very,’ Cassie says. ‘Well, I bet you are a bit.’

‘Just a
bit
!’ He smiles, meeting her eyes at last; sucks a bendy wail out of the harmonica.

The sound of Fred twanging the guitar into shape floats through. Larry touches her shoulder and goes out.

‘What was that about?’ Graham says.

‘What?’

‘You want to watch him, you know.’ He backs her against the sink and tries to kiss her.

‘You’re drunk,’ she says, pleased, shoving him away.

‘And you’re not?’

She pushes him again. ‘Moi?’ He kisses her, smoky, bristly, deep with a tinny harmonica edge. She loops one of her legs round his. ‘Are we OK then?’ He kisses her again, but less deeply and pulls away.

A riffle of ragtime comes through to them. Cassie has a sudden urgent hankering for something cool and sweet. ‘Hey, imagine ice cream,’ she says and shivers.

As she goes back out with the tea, Larry opens yet another bottle, the sound like a finger popping in a cheek. Like Dad did, she thinks, almost shocked by the memory. You could scream at the top of your voice here and no one would hear you. But maybe tomorrow, someone rounding up sheep a thousand miles away would catch the trail of a scream drifting past and pause to wonder. And then forget.
Stupid
thought. She shakes it from her head.

Mara hunches forward, her breasts crushed together, cradled in her arms like a baby. ‘His fingers are like fishes when he plays,’ she says, and Cassie can see the shoal of them flickering on the strings.

‘Tea anyone?’ she asks, but no one answers. And she can’t even be bothered to pour it for herself. She settles back and, feeling a glow in her belly, puts her hand there. She feels like she did when they were first together and couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Graham looks sexy when he plays. She picks up her glass again and Larry leans over and tops her up.

‘I must drink water,’ she says into his face. ‘I made a pot of tea.’ Her voice comes out a slur.

‘You and your tea!’ Larry laughs and touches her shoulder. Through the fleece she feels his fingertip linger.

Graham shakes his harmonica, picks up his fag. He narrows his eyes, looking at her through the smoke.

‘Shall I pour you a cup?’ Larry asks but she shakes her head.

Fred’s fingers dart across the strings, a sudden feeding frenzy. She grins. Larry is still watching her.

‘What?’ Larry says. ‘What’s the joke?’

But she can’t be bothered to say, doesn’t trust her voice. He gazes at her for a moment longer, as if she’s worth puzzling over, then he turns away.

‘Who’ll dance?’ Mara says, getting up and jolting the table so everything clatters. A candle topples over, briefly flares and goes out. Cassie stands it up. Something brushes her cheek, something soft, a scrap of fallen moth-wing perhaps. Mara holds up her arms, her red shawl stretched across her back like wings.

‘Like the moth,’ Cassie says.

‘What?’

But she shakes her head and watches Mara throw her head back, eyes closed, and start to sway. Cassie gathers the hot
spilled pool of wax into her palm. It almost, but not quite, burns.

‘I love to dance,’ Mara says.

Larry gets up and leans against the veranda post. Cassie thinks he’s going to dance but he just looks at Mara. She can’t read his face. Graham watches too, this naked woman moving to the music. Cassie watches for his expression. It strikes her as funny – almost. She brought him here to get him away from other women, and now there’s
this
, right in his face. And him going on about Larry! Well, it won’t hurt him to wonder.

Fred’s eyes are shut, his features crouched intensely as he improvises a riff, humming with it, beating the side of his fist to make an extra element of rhythm. Looks weird, the way he picks and strums with his thumbless hand, but it works. It’s brilliant. He is. Shut inside himself, the music pouring out. The wax is hardening in the scoop of Cassie’s palm. Mara’s body is waxy and luxurious in the unreliable light.

The shawl slides from her shoulders. ‘You, dance with me,’ she says, pointing to Graham.

‘Nah.’ He shakes his head.

Cassie looks to Larry, expecting him to stop Mara, say she’s overtired, or overexcited or in need of medication. But his eyes fix on Graham. ‘Dance,’ he says.

‘Why not?’ Graham gets up. Mara’s smile is like a surprised and grateful child’s as she reaches up her arms and sways with him, her breasts pressed flat against his vest. Must feel hot like that. Must feel soft. Cassie squeezes the wax and digs her nails in. They turn, the dancers, so Graham’s back is to her. He prats about a bit, wiggling his hips, bending Mara down. All he needs is a rose between his teeth. Mara laughs, breathlessly, her hand like a starfish on the small of his back. It’s only dancing. The wine has not agreed with Cassie. She needs to drink some water, needs to get out of here and lie down.

Fred plays on, as if oblivious to the dancers. She feels Larry’s eyes on her and when she looks up he gives her a slow smile.

‘Dance?’ he says.

‘No,’ she says. The wax is hard, she drops it on the table and gets up. ‘No, thank you.’

She pushes past Graham and Mara, who do a half-turn to let her pass. Maybe Graham tries to catch her eye, she doesn’t look. ‘Dishes in the morn,’ she says, careful not to slur, catching hold of the rail to stop herself stumbling down the steps. She goes round behind the shearers’ shed and out of sight. The stars are up there, wrong in the wrong sky, the moon is full and blank white, a counter stolen from some game. Its light is strong enough for shadows. In the shadow of a tree, she’s sick.

Dear Mum and Dad
,

My girlfriend and I are in Australia working on an exsheep station. You’d like Cassie, I’m sure. I’m painting. I know it’s a long time since I’ve written. After my degree show I, that argument, I didn’t mean I

An ashy morning. Burnt-down candles, fag-ends stubbed in the remains of stew, food dried on to plates in a scabby crust. Should have finished clearing up last night. Flies crawling, buzzing, rubbing their dirty hands together. Cassie’s head aches, the light stabs as she collects the glasses, carries them into the kitchen. Almost all the plates have got dirty, somehow, as if there were twenty people here, not five. It’s getting out of control, the kitchen. The sink still full from last night.
Cassie’s Outback Kitchen
. Ha! What is up with her? At home she would never let it get in such a state. She has this kind of almost constant
lassitude
. She hasn’t done anything much to the garden except keep it tidy, hasn’t even started her patchwork. The effort of planning, the effort of
thinking
– well, there will be time.

The range has gone out so no hot water to wash the dishes till she cleans it out and lights it or Graham does. When he wakes up. How everyone sleeps round here, it drives her mad, the sticky snoring. What she would not give for a swim. A plunge into cold, clean water. Something scuttles in the corner as she reaches for the shovel to scrape the cinders out.

It was only polite of Graham to dance with Mara. What if he’d refused? They are being paid to be companionable and companionable was what that was. The sort of thing companions
do. Dance.
She
should have danced with Larry. What would Graham have said to that?

There’s a filthy taste in her mouth. At least she doesn’t smoke. Today she’ll get this kitchen clean, get everything sorted. Drink less, get to bed earlier from now on. Get healthy. Get this kitchen straight and bake some bread. Get out there in the garden. It’s something she can do, put things in order, something that is satisfying, absorbing, something that makes a difference to her immediate world.

At home it feels almost like a dirty secret the way she loves to clean, make order out of chaos, make the dull things shine. You’d laugh looking at this lot, but it’s true. Not something you can say at dinner parties,
‘What do you do?’ ‘Well, I love to cook and clean.’
But how has it slipped so far? Sometimes she wishes she was her grandmother. That housekeeping was all she had to do and she could be admired,
fulfilled
, simply for doing it well.

She peels an orange from a sack beside the fridge. You can’t keep them in a sack like that. She puts some on a plate. A fruit bowl would be useful here, she adds one to her mental list. The pith beneath the oily peel is soft and dense as human skin. The juice is sweet and pippy. Tea will have to wait. Everyone still asleep, the lazy sods. Dance yes. But not
nakedly
. But it’s not his fault, is it? The orange tastes clean in her mouth and somehow innocent. They won’t get drunk like that again.
She
won’t.

She puts in firelighters and papers, strikes a match, checks that the flame has caught and shuts the stove door. She sneezes, a drift of ash caught in her nose. She goes out and piles up the plates, scrapes wax from the wood, brushes and scrubs. She carries in the wine bottles and lines them up beside the sink. Eight bottles they drank last night.
Eight
bottles between five people; well, four, since Fred was drinking beer. And Mara only had a glass. No wonder she feels rough.

Last night when Graham came to bed she hadn’t spoken,
pretending to be asleep, watching him through half-shut lashes. No candle, just the strong moon lighting up the unicorn curtains. He’d stumbled, blundered, stripped, fallen on to the bed beside her with a groan. He’d let something in with him, maybe a mosquito, something that whined. She’d covered herself completely in the sheet, listening to him fall asleep as fast as if someone had pushed him, she actually thought she heard him topple before he began to snore.

She’d lain listening, wanting to wake him up and talk to him. But not knowing how to talk to him. How weird it must feel to be pressed up against a naked woman with people looking on so closely, with her
husband
looking on. Did he get an erection?

She’d lain fretting for what seemed like hours. Heard Fred go into his room, the creak of the bed as he lay down, the rumble of
his
snore. Must be all the drink. Graham hardly snores at home but now he’s taken it up with a vengeance. Two lots of snoring, one in her ear, one travelling through the walls; maddeningly sometimes in unison, sometimes not, an almost continuous noise as if they were carrying on a nocturnal dialogue. Amazingly, despite all that, she’d drifted off to sleep, though her dreams were as thin and irritating as the mosquito’s whine.

She stands in the hall, looking at all the locked doors. Wide, warped floorboards, a strip of dusty carpet. Locked doors.
Why?
She tries a cupboard, which does swing open, letting out a fusty rubbery smell. She sees, amongst the jumble of things, a giant tin of paint. Brilliant white emulsion. Her heart leaps. She knows what she’ll do, what will make things better. Like a new start. She’ll paint the kitchen. Larry will be pleased, Mara will. Everything will be different when the stains are painted out, the marks of mashed mosquitos covered up.

Fred shambles into the kitchen, squinting at her with his little lapis eyes. She’s very glad to see him. To see another – relatively – normal person.

‘G’day,’ he says.

‘Thought no one was ever going to get up.’

‘Early bird, love.’

‘I wish,’ she says, ‘I wish, I wish I had a fruit bowl.’

‘A fruit bowl.’ He mimics her English accent.

‘For the oranges, they would look so nice.’ For some reason she’s on the edge of tears. She blunders on, ‘They’re never really fresh in England, oranges or lemons either, you don’t realise till you’ve tasted fresh. Would you like an orange? These are really good.’

‘Coffee?’

‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

Fred digs his teeth into the skin of an orange, screwing up his eyes against the spray of oil. He has a glitter of sweat like dew along his hairline. Plentiful soft dull hair. He pulls up a chair, sits down. His legs are thick and hairy and his lovely babyish feet are bare.

‘Fred –’

‘Mmmm?’