Charades (14 page)

(1) there are riders;

(2) they are wearing jodhpurs and white shirts and bush hats;

(3) one seems to be a woman;

(4) yes, one is certainly a woman with long black hair;

(5) the other is a man who —

And then, considerably before it would have been possible to distinguish either face, what kind of pre-knowledge is it that reaches out, that robs you of breath, that makes you stumble …? There is a certain space when no record-keeping is possible, the graph of awareness unplottable.

“Hello!” Kay's mother calls. “What beautiful horses. Can we pat them?”

Kay thinks she is going to faint. Pieces of ground slide around her, their motion sickening. Remember Phar Lap? she considers, illogically, calling out, as though this might break her fall.

“Hello!” Nicholas says. The voice strikes her the way God's voice must have struck Moses on the mountain, a divine reverberation. She cannot look. “Hello,” he says again, concerned. “Is something the matter with your little girl?”

Little girl,
Kay hears and wishes to die. The gap between herself and Bea widens; they are both fourteen but in the eighth grade, Kay is often mistaken for a ten-year-old; Bea, only eleven months older and already working (she says) for some man in the city, is often taken for a fully grown woman. Seventeen or eighteen at
least.

“Katherine?” her mother says, startled, looking back. “What is it, Katherine?”

Kay's eyes are watering, she can see nothing but pinwheels of light. “Nothing,” she mumbles, rubbing them. “I've got something in my eye.”

“The horses won't hurt you,” Nicholas says. “You're not frightened, are you? Here, wouldn't you like a ride?” And there is apparently a succession of movements — rather in the manner of a cyclone moving down from the Bundaberg coast — and one of the gods has descended and swept her up and her legs are straddling the shoulders of the chestnut mare and she is looking the other blue-black horse in the eye.

Oh humiliation. (To be hefted up as though she were a child!)

Oh bliss.

Nicholas's left arm is lightly around her waist. His right hand, resting in front of her on the red-gold neck of the horse, is looped and ribboned with the reins. She can see each precious knuckle, a press of ivory bone against the tanned skin; she can see the pale down of hairs that begin at the cuff of his shirtsleeve and ride up toward the bases of his fingers; she can see the fishnet, the webbing, the myriad tiny lines of his skin. She has never seen anything so beautiful.

Seafoam drips from the mouth of the blue-black horse and it whinnies. Nicholas wheels the chestnut mare and laughs, and Kay's mother calls “Oh careful, do be careful!”

“Isn't she a pretty little thing?” Nicholas laughs, and musses her hair.

Me,
Kay thinks. He means me.

“Isn't she pretty, Verity?” he calls.

It is possible that the blood which is banging against the top of Kay's head and the tips of her fingers will come spurting out like a blast from a fire hose, lavishly crimson. She waits for an answer from the rider of the blue-black horse. She knows exactly how that voice should sound.

She dares at last to look, squinting, and shading her eyes.

Verity does not squint. Verity's horse, though it champs and tosses its head, does not move without her permission. Verity is watching Kay with the attentiveness of a collector assessing an object that just might — and yet cannot be, surely? — that just might, conceivably, be so valuable that … The collector is quiet with excitement, very quiet, waiting to place a bid, not wanting to alert …

“What's the matter?” Nicholas calls to her gaily. “I won't drop her, you know, Verity. She's quite safe.”

Kay has no ordered thoughts at all, though later she concludes that she is certainly not surprised. What could have been more natural? As fish fall back into the sea, as bellbirds keep to the gullies … What could have kept Nicholas and Verity apart?

Verity asks: “What school do you go to?”

Kay cannot speak, but her mother, embarrassingly helpful, says: “She's at Wilston State. She's in grade eight and her teacher thinks she might win the Lily Medal. She wants to go to university.”

Mum!
Kay pleads in soundless anguish, in silent mortification.

Verity says: “I went to Wilston State.”

Kay looks at her then. It seems to her that nothing has changed, not the dark eyes, not the grave and level stare, not the hand in the pocket. It might have been yesterday, that day in the Wilston school library. Verity's fingers, their shapes visible against the skin of her riding pants, count and recount hidden objects.

Raisins, Kay thinks.

Verity nods, as though a contract has been agreed to. She does not smile. (Has Verity ever smiled?) She says: “You're Katherine Sussex. I remember.”

That is where the movie stops.

Kay could not, no matter how many nights she lay awake, get herself down off the horse, or make Verity explain the years between, or free Nicholas's hand from the reins.

She had, with elaborate and labyrinth comments, tried to waylay her mother.

“Mum, do you remember that picnic at Mt Glorious?”

“Which picnic?”

“Oh that time … I don't think Bea was there. I think … was there one time when we saw some horses?”

“Horses? We often saw horses. Which time do you mean?”

“Yes but … one time we
talked
to the people on the horses. And … and didn't someone give me a ride?”

“Talk?” Her mother sighs. “Strangers were always offering you sweeties or rides or something, it was dangerous, you'd go off at the drop of a hat. We had to keep our eyes peeled. Which time do you mean?”

* *

Kay learned a year later, from her Latin teacher in high school, the word
syllogism.
She loved to roll it on her tongue.
Syllogism.
She saw mind bending backwards, turning somersaults, doing the splits.
Syllogism:
a game of construction and deconstruction.

She wrote on the flyleaf of her Latin primer:

Daydreams seem harmless, but they are dangerous.

I daydreamed that Bea would come to Brisbane.

Therefore Bea's father died.

Daydreams seem real, but they are just delusions.

I daydream about Nicholas and Verity.

Therefore they might not be real.

Daydreams are dangerous and real.

At school I dreamed of someone to protect me.

Therefore I made up Verity and she became real.

I wanted to see Verity again.

I wanted Nicholas to touch me.

Therefore I made them meet.

Kay resorted, finally, to the test of fire. Casually, so very casually, she said to Bea: “Do you remember that boy we used to watch when we were still in Wilston school? That high school boy?”

“Nicholas Truman?” Bea asked.

“Was that his name? The one who used to play a recorder?”

Bea hurled herself onto her bed and shrieked with laughter. “Recorder! You silly ninny! Did you
believe
that stuff I used to tell you? Did you really and truly believe? Honestly, Kay, you're such a drip, you're the most — I don't
believe
you swallowed that —”

“Anyway, I think I saw him. He was with a girl, this beautiful girl. She has long black —”

“Oh,
her.”
Bea lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. “Verity Ashkenazy. She went to Wilston too, so Nicholas says. Damned if I remember. She's a bit, you know …” Bea tapped her forehead with one finger. “I'm not too worried about
her.”

5

Raisins

“What would you call a hundred-sided figure?” Charade asks. She wonders: is it a centagram …?

Centagram? Katherine wonders. Centagraph? Centagon? Would that be the word? She is deep in the stacks of the university library, her carrel in a mauvely lit cave around which book spines rise like a forest. She is doodling on foolscap sheets: circles, tangents, deflected tangents; contingencies, contiguities; hundredsided figures. If one took a turning at every fork on the way, at predictable intervals and always in the same direction, then wouldn't one eventually complete a faceted circle, more or less, clockwise or anti, depending on the consistent direction of the turns? But then suppose one turned left or right randomly,
and altered the distance travelled along each tangent …?

The page is beginning to look like a nerve-map in Gray's
Anatomy.

If we hadn't moved to Brisbane? she wonders.

If she hadn't been sent to the library on Mondays, if Bea's father hadn't died, if Nicholas had never lain down beneath a mango tree in Finsbury Park and played his recorder, (if Bea hadn't invented his recorder?), if she hadn't heard that word, that exotic word
university,
first spoken to her, oh irony, by Bea …?

Who would I be, she wonders, if I'd married Merv Watson when I turned eighteen, as asked? After the prayer meeting he'd waylaid her, on an Easter Saturday afternoon, right in front of the church. She was fingering the ragged cedars — was it just a year ago? yes — fingering the cedars and apparently watching the trams rumbling down through the Fortitude Valley and into the city; watching the trams but seeing Bea.

“The beach naturally, where else?” Bea had said. “With a bunch of friends.”

(What friends?)

Katherine pleated fronds of cedar between her fingers and asked herself: Who — apart from Bea — would believe that this is the way I spend Easter?

She saw a wave toss up the bodies of Nicholas and Bea and roll them golden up the Southport sands. She imagined Bea, her wet hair in a stream of laughter, provoking a game, getting herself chased, luring Nicholas away from the group, away away, disappearing between the dunes where pandanus and scrubby ti-tree grew in clumps.

“I believe it's God's will, Kay,” Merv Watson said. “Prayer … if we seek His guidance … morning and evening … prayer. Revealed to me, I believe.”

“What?” She made an effort to attend. “Sorry, I wasn't listening.” And then slammed into an amazing possible future, looked it full in its watery eye. When she caught her shocked breath, her instinct was to say tartly: “God's will? That's the
last
reason I'd marry a man.”

“Hubris?” she asks Charade years and years later, different country, different decade. “Did I catch it from Bea? Or else … 
I don't know … it takes such energy to rebel against people you love, you have to crank something up. God was grandpa/ grandma/father/mother, I couldn't move. It seemed to start then and got addictive.”

“Hubris?” Charade asks.

“What?”

“Did you mean you got addicted to hubris?”

Katherine frowns, poised above several possible landing strips, getting her bearings. “The … where was I? Merv Watson. Not hubris, perhaps, but certainly a taste for rebellion, it seems to date from him. Just wave a flag like
This is God's will
or
These are the rules
and you'll see smoke. You'll smell it. It'll singe my hair.”

But Merv Watson. How was she to swim free of the tentacles of prayer and God's will? Constraints: they were everywhere. It is hard, so much harder than fighting dragons, to defend oneself against the innocent; and Merv Watson was an innocent, a hopelessly shy man, though (stiffened by the Holy Spirit) an earnest and fearless preacher on street corners, an expert with carburettors and spark plugs, a garage mechanic and a saint. The soul of goodness, impossibly gentle. Quite, in point of fact, impossible. Oh help! she telegraphed to Bea, and an answer came, a Bea answer, kindness-coated of course, but effective; a dishonourable, but oh so brilliant cheat.

“Will you marry me, Kay?” Merv Watson asked.

“I'd have to pray about it,” she said demurely, trumping his ace …

“Though that gambling metaphor, Charade, didn't come to me then, or even in the university library,” Kay says at a different point on her time graph. “I knew as little about trumps and card games as I knew about the Melbourne Cup. No, it's only now that it strikes me what a clever little cheat I was. Oh poor Merv. I'd taken no more notice of him, ever, than if he'd been a hymn book. But he had to respect God's will.”

“And you told him —”

“Oh yes, it seemed kinder. Lied gravely and sweetly through my teeth. Though really …” They are pacing up and down the shoreline of a lake somewhere east of Toronto. Katherine picks up a handful of pebbles, starts skipping them one by one. “Really,
was
it lying after all? It couldn't possibly have been the will of … Could it? But then, you know, he looked so forlorn …” One of her stones takes seven show-off steps before the water swallows it. She laughs. “He looked so
deflated
that I stood on tiptoe and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek.” She skips another stone: five bounces. “I can't explain, I simply can't convey what a wicked thing that was, Charade. In that place, at that time, to that person. He looked so shocked that I did it again. I couldn't help myself. It was cruel, really.”

But if she hadn't been cruel?

In the university library in 1961, Katherine Sussex — lucky undergraduate on a Commonwealth scholarship — closes her eyes and sees herself scrubbing car grease from Merv's shirts, hears several toddlers crying, hears the
Gospel Hour
on the wireless. She opens them again and reaches out instinctively to stroke the spines of the nearest books: Late Roman Empire, history, the wars, the divisions, the turning of the faceted circles, third level below ground in the stacks. She takes a deep breath of the musty air, reassured.

But what saved me? she wonders, amazed, shivering slightly.
(Are you saved?
Merv used to demand of passers-by on the streets of Brisbane.
Are you saved?
he would ask through a megaphone on Friday nights. A beacon fixed at the corner of Adelaide and Albert streets, in front of the Commonwealth Bank, he would call to the lost teeming by:
Brother, sister, are you saved?)
What saved me? Katherine asks herself. Where did it come from, the force that jumped me from Merv Watson's orbit? Was it Bea juice or Verity's raisins? Who was dreaming me? Thinking me out? What quantum-leaped me?

“Oh my God,” Bea had shrieked, rolling on their bedroom floor and kicking her feet in the air with glee. “Merv Watson. Oh my God, that's hysterical.” Suddenly sombre, she sat up, fingers like granny glasses round her eyes. “Well, maybe you should. Yes, I think he's your type. You could pray together for virgin births. You could read the Bible in bed. You could have three kids without fucking.”

Katherine pelts the water with stones, a fusillade. “Sometimes, Charade, your bloody know-it-all mother …” (Was that where the rift had begun in earnest?) “Your mother and her fantastic claims …!” Jets of water spurt up like accusations.

Charade, about to skip a stone, stops. “What do you mean,
her fantastic claims
? What do you mean exactly?”

“Nothing,” Katherine says. “Nothing at all really, absolutely nothing. It's just … I'm still angry with her.” (Is she still angry?) “Sometimes, anyway.” (Though at others, she misses Bea so intensely that …)

“Get out,” she had yelled at Bea, hurling pillows, books, shoes. “Get out of my room and don't come back. You're not my sister, you're not even … get out get out get out.”

“Pleasure!” taunted Bea. “B'lieve me, Lady Muck, Lady K, a pleasure. For your info, I got a room at the Duke of Wellington, I been more or less living there for weeks. You could visit, Lady Muck, except I don't serve morning tea.”

“The Duke of Wellington!” Katherine was aghast, titillated, enthralled. “I don't believe you.”

“I've been working there part time for years, you dumb ninny. You and Merv Watson can bring tracts and Gideon Bibles.”

“I wouldn't be caught
dead
at the Duke of…. That's
cheap,
you're cheap, you — you barmaid!” A cushion flew by Bea's head. “You whore!” But Katherine, who knew this word only from the text of a seventeenth-century play by John Ford, pronounced it “wore”, causing Bea to double up in a fresh bout of helpless laughter.

“Oh you should, you should,” she gasped. “You should marry Merv Watson. You should.”

“I hate you,” Katherine shouted.

“Lady K, Lady K, Lady K,” chanted Bea, throwing things into a knapsack, “she doesn't know B from A, she doesn't know prick from pray.” She laughed wildly, ducking a shoe. “Lady Muck, Lady Muck, Lady Muck, she doesn't know faith from f —”

Katherine put her hands over her ears.

In the morning she read the message on the wardrobe mirror, whitely scored with a cake of soap.

K: You can visit at the Duke if you want. You have to ask at the bar, they'll show you where. I didn't mean the stuff about Merv, I was joking. B.

“You know, Kay,” the pastor said in a kindly voice. “I think you should give our dear brother Merv the most prayerful consideration.”

“Katherine,” she'd insisted tartly, caught somewhere between guilt and amusement and cold fury. “My name is Katherine, not Kay.” But where would she have gone spinning to as Mrs Kay Watson, K the Unknown, Mrs Curbside Evangelist, Mrs Garage Attendant, Bewildered K?

“You know, Kay,” the pastor said, unctuously patient, “if we —”

“Katherine.”

“Yes. If we close a door in the Lord's face, He'll just come back in through a window. You can dodge all you like, but He'll get you in the end. There's no escaping God's will.”

“What about Bea?” she demanded. Free-flying Bea. What pastoral nets could touch her?

“Ah Bea, our lost sheep. Bea least of all. You can be sure God has special plans for Bea.”

(— who will give God a run for his money, Katherine thought. Will God go pubbing at the Duke of Wellington, keeping tabs, waiting and watching for his chance?)

“There's no escaping,” the pastor said again. “I do not believe it is God's will, this university bee in your bonnet. You are tempting the Holy Spirit, he may have to break you. You can't get away from God's will, Kay.”

But Kay has escaped into Katherine, and who will Katherine become while she dodges nets and the network of wills?

Who would I become, she asks herself in the university library, if I were to major in … say, history? or one of the sciences? instead of English/French honours?

She is majoring in English, veering into the Middle Ages, because Verity Ashkenazy is the graduate tutor. She is also majoring in French literature. The French department's junior lecturer, a dazzling, a brilliant, a most
European
young man with whom every undergraduate girl is in love, is Nicholas Truman.

“Will he play Proust today, or Villon?” a student in Katherine's section, Richard St John, asks with archly raised eyebrow

“Pardon?” she says.

“He plays both roles to the hilt, wouldn't you say? Depending on the day of the week.” Richard St John has published poetry in two university quarterlies, one of them edited in Sydney. He has written a letter to Stephen Spender in England and has had a reply. He has written to W H. Auden. He knows everything, and sooner or later, it is certain, like all good little Australians, he will be rewarded with Oxford. Katherine believes that he thinks her stupid: she trusts his judgment.

“Villon?” she echoes cautiously.

“Those Churchie boys,” Richard St John says, shaking his head. (He himself went to Brisbane Grammar.) “Dreadful poseurs. Mope, mope, that's the usual,
n'est-ce-pas
? Sonnets to the Dark Lady in the English Department, Office 205, pale and wan and lonely proustering, yawn yawn yawn, madeleined out of his mind. Or else it's down at the Duke of Wellington. Roistering. Playing Villon.”

The Duke of Wellington. Bea can't speak French but doesn't need to, and is much less confused than Kay. Bea knows what she knows. Bea knows everything she needs to know as she pushes glasses across the counter. Amber foam, like the off-coloured wrack on the seashore, braids her wrists, stains the cuffs on her sleeves.

“La broue
,
”
Katherine tells her, delivering a final washload left at the house, looking around nervously, severely ill at ease. “Beer broth, it's called in French.”

“You don't say?” Bea, doing something disturbing with her tongue, blows circles of smoke in Kay's face. I call it head.”

“How can you live here? How can you? Why don't you come home?”

“Come home,” mocks Bea. “Where's that?” She blows a corkscrew of smoke that spirals itself around Kay. “What for?”

I miss you, Kay will not say. Who's going to translate the world for me? she wants to cry. Please, she wants to beg. She says neutrally: “You know I didn't mean it.”

“You don't say?” smiles Bea and lets her eyelids droop low and heavy.

Katherine, who knows less and less, breathes the tranquil and musty air of the university library, reaches up and strokes the dimpled cliff face of the bookshelves, the fort that protects her, and turns back to her translation.

Wyrd bi ful ar
æ
d!

She translates:
Fate
(the fate of the seafaring wanderer lost in the late eighth century)
is fully fixed.