As Far as You Can Go (17 page)

Still haven’t got through to Mara. Need some female company but she’s on medication for some mental thing, not sure what but surely it’d be better to talk? Like
counselling
talk, rather than be on her own all the time. Will have a go at Larry but he is so protective. He’s into pharmacuteicals (or however you spell it) in a big way
.

I wish I could

Had a strange talk with Larry today. Have to talk to
someone
.
What do you think of this, giving someone a drug to try and change their behaviour? He says it’s the future. Would you?

Remember that thing that Dad wrote in our autograph books when we were little? Be careful what you wish for. Remember? I still miss him, don’t you? Still feel Mum shouldn’t have sent us off to school straight after he died. Oh I know, change the record! Too much time to think here, that’s the trouble, too much thinking not enough doing. I just feel kind of – lazy and detached. Not me at all
.
Must be the heat. It reminds me of boarding school actually. Nothing like it really but – just that feeling of being cut off from everything. What’s going on in the big wide world???

Give my favourite (only) niece lots of kisses, missing her – can she walk yet? I’m so sad to miss that
.

Miss you
,
please
,
please
,
please
write soon. Stroke Cat
.

Cassie xxxxxxxOOOOOOOOxxxxxxx

Graham pauses on the veranda and stretches, breathes in, right to the bottom of his smoky lungs. It’s early. Up before Cassie for once. Good to have a sense of purpose. This must be what it’s like to go to work. Nah. He remembers the one time he did have a ‘proper’ job, a 9–5 job. Shipping office, paperclips, forms, a collar and tie! What kind of life is that: a noose round your neck every morning? He’d gone out for a sandwich one lunchtime, ripped off his tie, and never returned. Stick that where the sun don’t shine.

He hoists himself up on to the veranda rail and balances. A white bird flaps by, high and loose against the blue. Gets a sniff of freedom, almost. He jumps down and goes into the kitchen. Larry’s already there, the air full of his poxy cologne, coffee, toast. He spoons a boiled egg from a pan.

‘Ah. Good morning,’ he says. ‘Want one?’

‘No ta.’

‘I’ve poured you some coffee. Milk?’ he says.

Graham looks at the scummy jug of reconstituted milk and shakes his head.

Larry spreads his own slice of crustless toast with Vegemite, cuts it into strips,
soldiers
. The egg sits in a blue and white striped egg cup. With the edge of a spoon, he slices off the top. Yellow bleeds down the shell, drips on to the plate. He dips a piece of
toast into the yolk, sprinkles it with salt and takes a neat bite. His eyes come close to twinkling as he chews. ‘Small pleasures, eh Graham? Small pleasures. You surely cannot beat them.’

Graham’s belly rebels against the bitter coffee, the viscous sheen of yolk on Larry’s teeth. ‘Yeah. Mara up?’

‘Once I’ve finished, I’ll take her an egg. To go to work on!’

Graham takes a deep breath. ‘Listen, man,’ he says. ‘She wants us to work in her sh – her room – but it’s too hot and nowhere near light enough. Tell you the truth I get a bit claustrophobic. Maybe you could –’

Larry does not look up from negotiations with his egg. ‘Oh no. Could not presume to interfere in decisions of such an artistic nature.’

‘But –’ Graham gives up. Impossible to tell, sometimes, whether Larry is taking the piss or if he really is a world-class prat. He gets up and fills a glass with water.

‘But?’ Larry holds the eggshell between finger and thumb and scoops out a cusp of slightly jellied white.

Graham swigs the water, sloshing it round his mouth to rinse away the sensation of coffee grounds against his teeth. ‘Nothing. But you know how hard she is to – to reason with.’

Larry blinks. ‘You’re asking
me
that?’

Graham cuts a slice of bread. Can’t be bothered to toast it. Decides to take tea out to Cassie. The kettle is hot enough, he makes a pot.

‘How’s our Cassie this morning?’

‘Still asleep.’

Larry nods, dabs the corners of his mouth with his napkin.

‘Sure I can’t interest you in an egg?’

‘No.’

With a spoon Larry lowers an egg for Mara into the bubbling water and turns the timer over. ‘Don’t you think this is the most ingenious invention? So simple. And really rather beautiful.’ He holds it up to the light, eyes on the trickling sand.

‘Yeah, whatever.’ Graham puts his bread, the pot and two mugs on a tray.

‘About an hour, then?’ Larry says. ‘Mara will be ready and waiting.’

Cassie is asleep until he bangs the tray down on the floor beside the bed. The room smells stale and fusty. She always wakes first. Usually. But everyone seems drowsy here – except Larry.

‘God, you’re up!’ she says, reaching for her tea. Her face is printed with rumple marks and her eyes look tiny. She yawns hugely, and Graham looks away from her fillings and the furry whiteness at the back of her tongue. ‘Maybe we’ll get some post today,’ she says. ‘I bet there’ll be piles. Gray –’ she reaches for his hand. ‘I love you, you know, as you are.’

He pulls a face. ‘How
else
would you?’

‘Yes. This is stupid,’ she says, ‘but it niggles me you know, that we never finished that talk. The clean-sheet talk.’ She smiles. There are crumbs of sleep in the corners of her eyes. He notices for the first time her moist pink tear ducts.

Something whooshes hotly through his veins.
‘OK,’
he says, ‘Christ’s sake! OK, last person I fucked. You really want to know? Jas.’

She stares at him blankly for a moment. A twig squeaks against the window.
‘Jas,’
she whispers, a line of white, like a drawstring, tightening across her upper lip. She clears her throat. ‘But whenever I – You always say you’re just friends.’

‘We are.’

‘That’s not what
just friends
do.’

He shrugs.

‘When?’

‘Why do you want to torture yourself?’

‘When.’

‘OK. That day you went to London to arrange this magical mystery tour.’ He sees her flinch. ‘Right. I’m off.’ He gets up.
‘See you later.’ But when he gets to the door he turns. Can’t leave her looking so wounded. Even if it is self-inflicted.

‘Look, that
was
before we said –’

She nods. Eyes down, staring at her mug of tea. ‘Yes,’ she says quietly.

‘I won’t –’ he hesitates. ‘I will, I am
trying,’
he says.

‘You certainly are!’ Her eyes when they look up have a glitter to them. ‘Not that there’s much chance of anything else here. Anyway –’ she hitches her mouth into a half-smile, looks at the door. ‘See you later.’

He goes out. Feeling dismissed. And does a backflip in the dirt.

*

But for the electric bars across the window showing that the sun is up, it could be the middle of the night. Holding his breath for a moment against the smell, perfumed with joss sticks but still like an animal’s den, a female animal’s, he waits for his eyes to adjust. He makes out Mara, slumped on the cushions. She is naked. Down boy, he thinks, though she’s not his type, no way.

‘Ready?’

‘Yeah.’ She sounds tired or dispirited.

‘Maybe not up to it today?’

‘I
am.’

‘OK, then. Let’s go and sit on the the veranda. Or my studio – nice in there.’

The stuffiness getting to him already. All this for Cassie with the sleep in her eyes, the drawstring round her mouth. Is this some kind of test? Maybe cooked up with Larry? He shakes his head at himself.
Get a grip, Graham
. Talk about getting paranoid!

‘It’s important we stay in here,’ Mara says.

‘But – the light –’

‘Here are the paints,’ she gestures to a low table, ‘all laid out.’

‘Yeah. What do you
want
, Mara?’

‘You
know.’

‘But
you
should be painting. We could go out and –’

‘
No!
Her voice rises. ‘Larry says you –’

‘OK, OK.’ He lets out a long stream of breath. Could kill for a smoke now. A nice quiet smoke out in the fresh air. ‘Are they body paints?’

‘Yes, Larry got them from a theatre shop in Perth. I like Cassie’s daisy. What about a daisy? A daisy, here.’ She holds out her arm and points to the skin above the elbow.

‘Why don’t
you
have a tattoo?’

Mara snorts and a bubble comes from her nose; she wipes with the back of her hand, then wipes her hand on the cushion beside her. ‘Tattoos don’t come off! If I had a tattoo how would I get rid of it? Cut off my arm?’

Graham resigns himself. Soonest done, soonest over. And the sooner she’ll get fed up with this daft idea.

As well as paint, there’s water, brushes, a palate, paper towels. All very organised.
Thank you, Larry
. Graham lowers himself down beside Mara. He crosses his legs, takes her heavy arm in one hand and prods the skin above the elbow. ‘Here?’

Surprisingly cool flesh. He selects a fine brush. Thinking of the delicate branching bones in Cassie’s foot, the daisy on the dry skin, he starts, a pointed brush, thick white pigment. Remembers when he first saw the daisy, how he’d longed to take her foot in his hand, to kiss it. Her cool, white foot. How it had seemed perfect and unattainable – but it wasn’t. Only a few nights later he had pressed his lips against the daisy and had caught the slight ordinary whiff of her foot.

Mara wriggles as he sketches in the petals. He grips her tightly round the wrist. Can feel the blood throbbing through her veins. Has to lean close to see, and breathes in her smell: sweat and heated skin, the sebaceous smell of hair, some sweet oil – coconut? Her stomach is rounded, a deep crease at the top
of each thigh, can’t see beneath the curve of her belly from this angle. Focusing on the daisy, he loses himself for seconds at a time. He holds his breath with concentration and sweat trickles down the side of his face.

He mixes grey to shadow the petals, makes a yellow centre and a branching stem. Skin is an interesting surface, the fine greasy grain of it. He could paint on Cassie’s skin, that would be different, drier skin, almost blue-white in the places never exposed to the sun. On her breasts where the veins branch he could make river deltas, he could make her pale nipples a dark and luscious red. Mara’s nipples are dark, down-pointed, the bump in the centre of each big as a berry. Imagine that between your teeth, the rubbery nub of it.

‘There.’ He gives a final flourish of green to suggest a pair of leaves and moves back. ‘Don’t touch it now, let it dry.’

‘Spray,’ Mara says.

‘What?’

‘There.’ She indicates an aerosol of fixative, SkinFix. A picture on the tin of an arm wreathed in snakes and roses. ‘Then it won’t rub off so quick.’

He sprays the skin and the smell of it in the thick still air makes the room swim. Christ. He puts his head down between his knees for a moment, blood singing in his ears. Mara’s hand touches the back of his neck. ‘You are sensitive.’ Her voice is a croon. ‘More than Cassie. She is a tough cookie.’

‘Just need air.’ He stumbles up, away from the touch of her hand and the stirring in his body – only a reflex – and to the door, opens it with a gasp of relief, lifts the curtain aside to let in light and air.

Mara stays where she is, down on the cushions, which the sun shows up as stained and worn. She twists her arm to see the daisy. Her body lit up as if in a spotlight, the deep shadows of her, the solid mass.

‘Nice,’ she says. ‘Thank you. Now –’

‘That’s all for today,’ Graham says. Two galahs hop amongst the hens. Squawking like hens too, the clowns. He inhales deeply and the day comes back into focus.

‘Oh but –’

‘Not so bad then?’ Larry startles him.

‘Look at my daisy. But I want –’

‘Don’t be greedy, Mara. Don’t push him too far all at once.’

Graham darts a look at Larry.

‘But more another time, eh? Tomorrow, Mara? Would that please you?’

‘Something more,’ she says.

‘All right with you, Graham? That wasn’t so bad, was it?’ Larry makes as if to pat his arm, but Graham side-steps.

‘Fine,’ he says, over his shoulder, walking off towards the shearers’ shed.

Box 25
Keemarra Roadhouse
Woolagong Station
30th November (ish)

Dear Patsy
,

You must be getting fed up with my letters now, if you’re getting them, well you’ll get lots of them all at once, this one will go in the post with the last one. I suppose I’m writing instead of phoning. It’s driving me mad not being able to talk to you, not knowing how you are. You’ll never guess what: Graham is now alone in the shed with Mara, painting on her, I think! On her skin. Talk about mad! It’s OK, though pretty weird. And sort of ironic when you think about it
…

We had that talk and guess what? Turns out that he was sleeping with
Jas
all along. Can you believe it? All that stuff about them being friends. Load of bollox. I never thought he’d actually
lie
. I asked him so many times. We even had Jas round to eat a few times – you met her at the goodbye party, remember? Dyed red hair, loud voice, smokes a lot. Flat chest. She was wearing something torn
.
So
I’m not really talking to him. How can I ever trust him again? But there’s no one else to talk to. Fred’s not here. Well there’s Larry, I can talk to him a bit. He’s nice, kind, just a bit – a bit
strange
but then being stuck out here … I think
I’ll
go strange after too much longer. Are you picking up my strangeness? Sometimes I wonder if we’re actually going to stick it a year. Hope so. It’d be embarrassing coming straight back after that big send-off! Though I so miss you
.

Oh no, thinking of coming home has made me want to cry. Please please please please PLEASE write, soon as you can. Kiss Katie, stroke Cat
.