Tom could hear his father:
They are better than stars or
water, / Better than voices of winds that sing, / Better than any
man’s fair daughter, / Your green glass beads on a silver ring.
The girl noticed Tom noticing; slipped her fingers under the necklace and held it up. ‘Isn’t it gorgeous? My birthday present from Nelly.’
Why not? Nelly had restrung the necklace, fitted it with a new catch. The gift was enriched with her labour. Tom was reminded again of childhood: of bazaar handkerchiefs embellished with lace or stitched monograms in the weeks leading up to Christmas; of birthday greetings fashioned from images cut from hoarded foreign cards and glued to coloured cardboard with flour-and-water paste. Such things were more than links in a disaffected chain of production and consumption. They bore a human tang.
All the same, he thought, She spent fifty cents on Yelena.
It was Nelly’s habit to roam the streets of their suburb after dinner, padded against the weather in her scarlet parka. On a June evening when a southerly carried the memory of icebergs, she had coaxed Tom out with her. It became their usual way of being together.
In invisible gardens on the hill, pale camellias were the ghosts of girls locked out after balls. There was the wintry fragrance of daphne; and once—but they could never find it again—a scented drift of violets escaping through pickets. Each dark street climbing west climaxed in a peepshow of a radiant city.
In Victoria Street they bought rice-paper rolls from a man with exquisite hands. A soft-bellied god smiled over joss sticks and golden mandarins. The public housing towers showed scattered patterns of light: the concrete punch cards of a superseded technology.
A girl going past said, ‘Forgiveness is really important. I forgive myself all the time now.’ Tom and Nelly shunned the narrow pavements, sauntering down the middle of the street, as people will.
Window displays drew them with the theatricality of light- defined space. A stage in Swan Street was a favourite. For weeks it held nothing but a backdrop of translucent cloth, ivory striped with gold. It floated and shimmered, a stream, a veil. It was sacred and profane. It was almost not there. It was lively with the magic of money.
From this temple they would cross to a discount department store. Here sly comedies were enacted. Bald mannequins clad in cheap, belted raincoats thrust suggestive hips at passersby. A boy in pyjamas straddled a man’s thigh, offering him a power tool for Father’s Day. Two women who appeared to be laden from a shopping spree at the store were discovered, on closer inspection, to be bag ladies in gaping sneakers and clothes held together with pins. Everything on display looked trumpery. That was the crack through which parody made its entrance, mocking the shoddiness of all such enchantments.
Between the river and the railway lines lay a semi-industrial zone where lights were few. Streets that began with auto repair shops and small foundries ended in yards packed tight with vegetables and vines. There were herbs planted in old paint tins, ashtrays on verandah tables, rusty bed frames, palings crooked as bad dentistry.
They passed an electricity substation and an overgrown quarry. Late cars zipped by on the freeway. Mists crept up from the river. Sometimes there were fireworks staggering about the sky.
When his wife left him, Tom moved to this inner suburb because it was one of the few he could afford on his own.
In that hellish interval when the humiliation of Karen’s choice was a blade endlessly drawn across his soul, he had a singular stroke of luck, buying his flat just weeks before the property boom doubled its value.
It was a neighbourhood on the way up. The butcher had taken to stocking free-range eggs. The doctors no longer bulk-billed. Wooden plantation blinds were replacing cutwork nylon in windows. Tibetan prayer-flags fluttered across verandahs; neighbours fell out over parking for their four-wheel drives. Pubs that had featured topless waitresses now offered trivia nights and wood-fired pizza. It was easier to buy a latte than a litre of milk. The roomy weatherboard places on the big corner blocks were coming down; townhouses were going up. There were fewer lemon trees and more roof gardens. Construction sites gave off the odour of cement dust and prodigious money to be made. Vistas ended in angled cranes, colossal needles knitting up the future.
The marvellous city built by gold and wool had once voided its filth in these parts. The sweet-watered river of the early days of settlement had been swiftly converted into a reeking flow. A sludge of cheap housing appeared, row after row of wooden cottages: so many flimsy coffins in which to bury the ambition of another century’s poor. It was the kind of suburb where people had lived in tiny buildings and worked in huge ones. Tanneries set up beside the river; later, factories. They were symbols of a great metropolis, signs that the colonial city was no longer raw material but an up-to-the-minute artefact.
Now the echoing shells of these industrial molluscs promised
Prestigious River Frontage
; or what one copywriter called
An Envious Lifestyle
. The riverside path had taken on rural airs, with poplars and gums and unruly willows. Men and women sweated doggedly along its length, or lunched on terraces overlooking the water. Wealth was inserting itself into this newly fashionable terrain, as decoration accrues on a renovated façade.
In the course of their walks, Nelly and Tom noticed that some shop fronts displayed a commemorative plaque. ‘William Merton, bootmaker, conducted business on this site in 1899.’ ‘Alice Corbett ran a bakery here in 1920.’ The memorials were puzzling in their arbitrariness, offering no indication why these places, dates and citizens had been singled out. Tom discerned the willed creation of a sense of the past: a municipal mythmaking. It produced the inscriptions in parks that signalled a site pregnant with meaning for the people who had lived here first: a tree where corroborees had been held, or one whose bark had served to fashion boats. Cloaked in virtuous intention, these signs functioned insidiously. They displaced history with heritage, plastering over trauma with a picturesque frieze. A spectator might have their detail by heart and no inkling of the chasm that separated bark canoes and William Merton, bootmaker.
The unofficial past flared more vividly, illuminated in matchlit glimpses. Tom and Nelly paused before roadside shrines dedicated to lives that had ended violently: makeshift memorials composed from soft toys and plastic flowers. There were dates, photographs, greeting cards on which the ink had blurred. Each shrine was a little gash in the illusion of continuity. Propped against walls or fastened to poles, what they proclaimed was the terrible fact of rupture.
Nelly talked of people in cities needing to find places that seemed to speak to them privately; places that detached themselves,
like spots of time
, from unmemorable surrounds.
They discovered they were both drawn to a convent school that stood beside a traffic-choked intersection a few miles to the north. Stiff pine trees lined its high perimeter wall. Painted white, an arcaded verandah on the upper floor glimmered in the apertures between dark branches.
It was the trees, they agreed, that gave the place its aura: setting it off from the polluted streets, suggesting an enchanted domain. At the same time, the pines were ambiguous presences, their green-black wings suggesting menace as well as protection.
Tom said the scene reminded him of a woodcut in an old book of children’s tales. It was like something remembered from a dream, said Nelly. ‘Something marvellous and strange you can almost see under the skin of reality.’
Tom described a tiny pair of opera glasses, imagined by Raymond Roussel, to be worn as a pendant. The writer had envisioned each lens, two millimetres in diameter, to contain a photograph on glass: Cairo bazaars on one and a bank of the Nile at Luxor on the other.
Nelly yearned for this virtual object; as Tom had known she would.
One day she produced a calico bag from her pocket, unfastened the drawstring at its neck and tipped its contents into her hand. When she opened her fingers, her palm was full of eyes. They had belonged to her grandmother, who had inherited them from her great-grandfather, who as a small boy in London had been apprenticed to a manufacturer of dolls. It was the child’s task to separate the black and brown eyes from the grey and blue ones, and then to sort each group again, in precise gradations of hue.
Nelly moved her fingers. Blue eyes shuddered in her palm. Kingfisher, cornflower, steel. Smoke crushed with violets. Tom looked at them, and they looked back. It was impossible not to avert his gaze.
They spoke of the past, discovering each other. Tom learned that Nelly was an only child. Her mother had died when she was fifteen, her father was
into serial marriage
. There had been a goldfish called fluffy.
It was not much to go on. He knew that Nelly had once been married, but little beyond that bare fact. A stray remark of Posner’s confirmed that the union had been short-lived. Tom longed to know more, of course. But he wouldn’t question Posner; and Nelly had a trick, to which he did not immediately tumble, of deflecting questions about herself with enquiries of her own. She drew from him stories of childhood, women, sorrows, travel, his preferences in matters trivial and weighty. What’s the first thing you remember? Would you rather live in the mountains or by the sea? What’s something you regret not doing? Describe a perfect city. Tell me something you’ve never told anyone else.
It was the kind of talk that takes place in bed. Except that Nelly, despite the intensity of her attention, withheld all bodily intimacy. She never touched Tom. Her hand didn’t accidentally brush his; an occurrence that, in any case, is never accidental, and requires collusion. It occurred to Tom that even her enthusiasm for their walks might be a device for avoiding closeness. There was the Wordsworth precedent: William and Dorothy out striding the dales for fear of what might take place between them in the confines of Dove Cottage.
One day he came to a decision as he was leaving the Preserve with her. On an unlit landing, he grasped her arm: ‘Nelly.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
The dark, confined space seemed to concentrate her odour. A succession of scenes, purely pornographic, was unreeling in Tom’s mind.
She disengaged herself, and continued down the stairs.
He swore that was the end of it. He lay on his bed compiling an inventory of the ways she repelled him; his cunning flesh working all the while at its own satisfaction.
Over the days that followed, what remained was his need for her. And beyond Nelly, for the world she had created. He missed the drift of people in and out of the Preserve, improvised meals and conversations, the jokiness. The sense of being caught up in a wide spate of imaginative work.
Small scenes haunted him. Nelly and Osman bent over the sink with dripping raspberry icypoles. Someone’s kid in stripy leggings riding a Razor scooter up and down the passage. He left a café without ordering, because a shelf behind the counter held a pink plastic sugar canister with a grey lid, identical to one in the Preserve. Lifting a glass from a sink of soapy water, he noticed the rainbow membrane of detergent stretched across it. His first thought was, Nelly would like that. Then he remembered. Her footsteps retreated through him down a cold stair.
To the raw ache of solitude he applied his usual balm of work: marking essays, reading, typing words onto a screen late into the night. The dog would leave his basket to settle on a rug in the study; first turning around thrice, an apprentice sorcerer. Later he would go out into the yard. When he returned, his fur carried the mineral scent of earth into the room.
Tom went to the cinema; out to dinner with colleagues. Then, at the end of a blunt winter’s day, in the act of transferring a packet of buckwheat noodles from a shelf to a supermarket cart, he froze. Pride, which had seemed insurmountable, lay in ruins: toppled, like that, and the view a sparkling clarity. What counted was that Nelly was not indifferent to him. He might learn from the discipline she imposed. An obstacle might be a gift, deferral conceived of as a slow striptease.
There was also the novelty of the situation. Tom was a product of his times: what he knew of preludes was swift and unambiguous. Among other things, his curiosity was pricked.
T
HERE WAS
no point going back to the country on Thursday night, Tom decided. He would sleep more soundly in his own bed; would rise early and drive up to the hills.
So he went looking for Nelly at the Preserve. But found only Rory, who told him that Nelly had not been well, and was staying at Posner’s. ‘One of her headaches.’
It had happened before. Tom told himself again that what mattered was Nelly having somewhere to go, someone to look after her. Once again the formula failed to counter his jealousy.
He became aware that Rory was studying him; covertly, the narrow eyes rapid and darting. Tom could not remember having been alone with him before. Silence lay between them, awkward as a beginning, heightened by the weather slapping at the panes.
Tom said, ‘Could you tell Nelly I need to hang on to her keys? I’ve got to go back to the bush for a few days.’
The boy nodded.
‘I’ll be off then.’
Rory said, ‘You OK? You look a bit shabby.’ Having blurted it out, he glanced away.
Tom thought, I forget how young he is. What he had diagnosed as sullenness, he now saw as the caution of someone who was trying to find a way of being in the world.
He told Rory about the dog.
‘That’s awful.’ The boy tugged at the hair under his lip, fingered the zip on his jumper. He was in the habit of touching himself, as if to make sure he was still there. ‘You should go up to Carson’s,’ he said.
‘But Nelly—’
‘She’s OK. Out of bed. I saw her at lunch.’ Rory pulled the zip down a little way, then did it up again. Tom understood that the boy was looking for something to offer him.
Rory said, ‘You should tell her what’s happened.’ His sympathies were engaged by Tom’s predicament, but what had just entered his mind was the table mat his mother used to place under his bowl when he was very young: a sunny circle stamped with bright blue butterflies.