North of Nowhere, South of Loss

Brian laughed. “There’s achievement for you.”

We lapsed into silence and drank another round of beer and stared at the river.

“Your mother said she ran into Richard’s mum.”

“Don’t get started, Philippa,” Brian warned.

“I miss them, I miss them. I miss our old gang. Don’t you?”

“No.”

“Liar.”

“I never miss anyone,” he said vehemently.

“Your mother said —”

“Okay, get it over with.”

“Get what over with?”

“The lecture on how I treat Dorrie.”

“I wasn’t going to say a word,” I protested. “But since you mention it, I don’t understand why you feel embarrassed. You were actually blushing, for God’s sake. As though anyone minds.”

“You think I’m ashamed of her.”

“Well?”

“It’s not that. I’m not. I’m protecting her. I can’t bear it when other kids smirk at her. At them. I can’t bear it.”

“Other kids?”

“There’s a lot you don’t know, Philippa.”

“I don’t know why you think they were any different from anyone else’s parents.”

He signalled for another jug, and we waited until it came, and then Brian filled both our glasses.

“They were,” he said. “That’s all.”

“They weren’t. I spent enough time at your place, for God’s sake.”

“God, I’m depressed,” Brian said.

“I spent time at Richard’s and Julie’s and Elaine’s. They weren’t any different from anyone else’s mum and dad.” Brian said nothing. With his index finger, he played in a spill of beer. We were both, I knew, thinking of Elaine.

“Sorry,” I said, “I shouldn’t have … That’s something that happens when I come back. Every so often, you know, maybe once or twice a year, I still have nightmares about Elaine. But not when I’m back here. When I’m here, we all still seem to be around. In the air or something. I can feel us.” I stared into my glass, down the long amber stretch of the past. “How long is it since you’ve been back, anyway?”

“Five years.”

“That’s your average? Once every five years?”

“It’s not that I want to come that often,” he said. “Necessity.”

I laughed. Brian did not. “You’re not usually this negative about Brisbane,” I protested. “When was the last time I saw you? Two years ago, wasn’t it? In Melbourne. No, wait. I forgot. London. June before last in London when you were there for that conference — Yes, and we got all nostalgic and tried to phone Julie, tried to track her down … that was hilarious, remember? We got onto that party line somewhere south of Mt Isa.”

“It’s different when I’m somewhere else,” Brian said. “I get depressed as hell when I’m back.”

“Boy, you can say that again.”

“Last time ever, that’s a promise to me,” he said. “Except for Dorrie’s funeral.”

“God, Brian.” I had to fortify myself with Cooper’s comfort. “You’re getting me depressed. Anyway, speaking of your mother, we’d better get going. What time’s she expecting us?”

“Oh shit.” Brian folded his arms tightly across his stomach and pleated himself over them.

“What’s the matter?”

“I can’t go.”

“What?”

“I can’t go, Philippa. I can’t go. I just can’t. Can you call her for me? Make up some excuse?”

I stared at him.

“Look,” he said. “I meant to. I thought I could manage it. But I can’t. Tell her I’m tied up. You’ll do it better than I could.”

“What the hell is the matter with you?”

“Look, tell her—” He seemed to cast about wildly for possible bribes. “Tell her we’ll take her out for lunch tomorrow, before my afternoon flight. I’m staying at the Hilton, we’ll take her there.”

“I won’t do it. I’m not going to do your dirty work for you. This is crazy, Brian. It’s cruel. You’ll break her heart.”

Brian stood abruptly, knocking over his chair and blundered inside to the pay phone near the bar. I watched him dial. “Listen, Dorrie,” I heard him say, in his warm, charming, famous-public-person voice. “Look, something’s come up, it’s a terrible nuisance.”

“You bloody fake!” I yelled. There were notes of rush and pressure in his voice, with an undertone of concern. It wasn’t Brian at all. It was someone else speaking, someone I’d never even met, someone who couldn’t hear a thing I was saying, someone who didn’t even know I was there.

“They’ve got something arranged at uni,” he said smoothly, unctuously. “I didn’t know about it, and the thing is, I can’t get out of it. I’ll tell you what though. Philippa and I will take you out to lunch tomorrow. She’ll pick you up at twelve o’clock, okay? and we’ll all have lunch at the Hilton. Look, I’ve got to rush, I’m terribly sorry. Look after yourself, Dorrie. See you tomorrow, all right? Bye now.”

“I’m going,” I said as he lurched back. “I’m taking a cab right now to your mother’s. I won’t be part of this.”

“Philippa, stay with me.”

“I won’t. It’s just plain goddamn rude and boorish when she’s got a meal prepared. At least one of us … I’m just bloody not going to—What? What is it? What the hell is it?

He looked so stricken that there was nothing to be said.

“All right,” I conceded, resigned. “Where do you want to go?”

“Come back to the Hilton with me. I don’t want to be alone. I have to get blind stinking drunk.”

In the cab I said: “How come I feel more wracked with guilt than you do?”

He laughed. “You actually think I’m not wracked with guilt?”

“Oh, I know why I am,” I said. “It’s because I’m a mother too.” If my son did this to me, I thought, I’d bleed grief. My whole life would turn into a bruise.

“There’s a lot you don’t know,” Brian said. “I can’t talk about it unless I’m blind stinking drunk.”

We didn’t go to his room. It wasn’t like that. We have never been lovers, never will be, never could be, and not because it isn’t there, that volatile aura, the fizz and spit of sexual possibility. I vaguely remember that as we got drunker we held each other. I seem to remember us both sobbing at some stage of the night. It wasn’t brother/sister either, not an incest taboo. No. We were once part of a multiform being, a many-celled organism that played in the childhood sea, that swam in the ocean of Brisbane, an alpha-helical membrane-embedded coiled-coil of an us-thing. We were not Other to each other or them, we were already Significantly Us, and we wept for our missing parts. We drank to our damaged, our lost, our dead.

When drink got us down to the ocean floor, I think Brian said: “It’s the house. I really believe that if I went there, I wouldn’t be able to breathe. I’d never get out of it alive.”

And I think I asked: “What did your mother mean about the nights? Those awful nights, she said.”

And the second I said it, a memory I didn’t remember I had shifted itself and began to rise like a great slow black-finned sea-slug, an extinct creature, far earlier than icthyosaurus, earlier than the earliest ancestor of the manta ray. It flapped the gigantic black sails of its fins and shock waves hit the cage of my skull and I was swimming back to Brian’s front gate, I was waiting for him there, fragrant currents of frangipani were swirling round, and these monstrously eerie sounds, this guttural screaming and sobbing, came pouring out through the verandah louvres in a black rush that whirlpooled around me, that sucked, that pulled … I clung to the gate, giddy with terror.

Then Brian came out of the house with his schoolbag slung over his shoulder and he pushed the gate open and pushed his way through and walked so fast that I had to run to catch up. “What is it?” I asked, my heart yammering at the back of my teeth.

“What’s what?” Brian demanded.

“That noise.” I stopped, but Brian kept walking. “That noise!” I yelled, and Brian stopped and turned round and I pointed, because you could almost see those awful sounds curdling around us. Brian walked back and stood in front of me and looked me levelly in the eyes and cocked his head to one side. He gave the impression of listening attentively, of politely straining his ears, but of hearing nothing.

“What noise?” he asked.

He was so convincing that the sound sank beneath the floor of my memory for forty years, even though, two blocks later, he said dismissively, “It’s nothing. It’s Ed. He does it all the time. It’s from the war.”

And forty years later, swimming up through a reef of stubbies and empty Scotch bottles, he said: “He never left New Guinea really. He never got away. And it was catching. After a while, Dorrie used to have Ed’s nightmares, I think.”

“Oh Brian.”

“Sometimes the neighbours would call the police. The only place they felt safe was the house. They never went anywhere.”

“I never had any inkling.”

“Because I protected them. I was magic. I designed a sort of ozone layer of insulation in my mind, you couldn’t see through it, or hear, and I used to wrap them up in it, the house, and my dad, and my mum.”

My dad and my mum. It would be something I could give her the next day, something to put with the corsage.

It was a long time after I rang the doorbell before anyone came. And when she came, she didn’t open the door. She just stood there on the verandah peering out between the old wooden louvres. She looked like a rabbit stunned by headlights.

“It’s me, Mrs Leckie. Philippa.”

“Philippa?” she said vaguely, searching back through her memory for a clue. She opened the door and looked out uncertainly, like a sleepwalker. She was still in her housecoat and slippers. She squinted and studied me. “Philippa!” she said. “Good gracious. Are these for me? Oh, they’re lovely. Lovely. Just a tic, and I’ll put them in water. Come on in, Philippa, and make yourself at home.”

It was eerie all right, one little step across a threshold, one giant freefall to the past. There was the old HMV radio, big as a small refrigerator, with its blistered wood front. There were two framed photographs on it, items from the nearer past, tiny deviations on the room as I knew it. One was of Brian’s wedding, the other of his brother’s. I picked up the frame of Brian’s and studied it. I hadn’t been at his wedding. We’d all got married in the cell-dividing years of the us-thing. I’d been overseas, though my mother had sent a newspaper clipping. I was trying to tell from the photograph if Brian had been happy. Was he thinking: Now I’ve escaped?

“I don’t understand about marriages these days,” she said, coming up behind me with the vase. She set the flowers on top of the radio. “I always thought Brian would marry you, Philippa.”

“That would have been some scrap,” I said. “We were always arguing, remember?”

“You would argue till the cows came home,” she smiled. “I always thought you’d get married.”

I set the frame down again, and she picked it up. “They didn’t have any children,” she said sadly. “Barry either. I don’t have any grandchildren at all.” She returned Brian and his bride to the top of the radio. “I wish they’d known him before the war, that’s all. Before it happened. I just wish … But if wishes could be roses, Ed used to say, or maybe it was the other way round. Would you like to see them, Philippa?”

I scrambled along the trail of her thought. “Oh,” I said. “Yes, I would. I noticed them from the gate. And your frangipani’s enormous, it’s going to swallow up the house.”

“Ed planted that,” she said. “He was always good with his hands, he had a green thumb. I have to get the boy down the road to mow the lawn for me now. Watch out for that bit of mud, Philippa, there were some cats got in. These ones,” she said, “Ed planted when the boys were born, one for each. This one was for Brian.”

It was a tea rose, a rich ivory. Champagne-coloured, perhaps. Off white, I would probably say to him in some future joust. His mother hovered over it like a quick bird, darting, plucking off dead petals, curled leaves, a tiny beetle, a grasshopper, an ant.

“You’ve kept them up beautifully,” I said.

“And I call this one Ed, I’ve planted a cutting on his grave.”

There was something about the way she bent over it, something about her gaunt crooked arms and the frail air of entreaty, that made me think of a praying mantis. Maybe she heard my thought, or maybe the grasshopper she pinched between finger and thumb reminded her. “He said something about a praying mantis,” she said. “You asked him about it, Philippa. What was that thing?”

“The ootheca.”

“Funny word, isn’t it?” She pulled her housecoat around her and tightened the sash. “He won’t be there for lunch, will he?”

I bit my lip. “He had to take an early flight,” I said. It was and it wasn’t a lie. We both knew it. “He had to be back in Melbourne.”

She concentrated on the roses, bending her stick limbs over them, a slight geometric arrangement of supplication. “Anyway,” she said. “I don’t like going out. We never did, Ed and me.” She straightened up and turned away from me, walking toward the gate. “I hope you won’t mind, Philippa, if I don’t …” At the gate, she reached up and picked a frangipani and gave it to me. “Could you tell him,” she said, “that I’ve still got his crystal set? It’s in his room. I thought he might, you know … I thought one day he might …”

I held the creamy flower against my cheek. It’s excessive, I thought angrily, the smell of frangipani, the smell of Brisbane. I had to hold onto the gate. There was surf around my ears, I was caught in an undertow. When I could get my voice to come swimming back, I’d tell her about the safety layer that Brian kept around his mum and his dad.

NORTH OF NOWHERE

They are curious people, Americans, Beth thinks, though it is easy to like them. They consider it natural to be liked, so natural that you can feel the suck of their expectations when they push open the door to the reception room and come in off the esplanade. Their walk is different too; loose, somehow; as though they have teflon joints. Smile propulsion, Dr Foley whispers, giving her a quick wink, and Beth presses her lips together, embarrassed, because it’s true: they do seem to float on goodwill, the way hydrofoil ferries glide out to the coral cays on cushions of air. Friendliness spills out of them and splashes you. Beth likes this, but it makes her slightly uneasy too. It is difficult to believe in such unremitting good cheer.

Of all the curious things about Americans, however, the very oddest is this: they wear their teeth the way Aussie diggers wear medals on Anzac Day. They flash them, they polish them, they will talk about them at the drop of a hat.

“Got this baby after a college football game,” Lance Harris says, pointing to a crown on the second bicuspid, upper left. Lance is here courtesy of Jetabout Adventure Tours and a dental mishap on the Outer Reef. “Got a cheekful of quarterback cleats, cracked right to the gum, I couldn’t talk for a week. It was, let me see, my junior year, Mississippi State, those rednecks. Hell of a close fight, but we beat ’em, all that matters, right? Keeps on giving me heck, but hey, worth every orthodontist’s dollar, I say.”

Beth never understands the half of it, but in any case, what can you make of people who talk about their teeth? She just smiles and nods, handing Dr Foley instruments, vacuuming spit. American spit is cleaner than Australian spit, that’s another interesting difference. Less nicotine, she thinks. No beer in their diets. But Scotch is yellowish too, wouldn’t that … ? and certainly the boats that go beyond Michaelmas Cay for marlin are as full of Johnnie Walker as of American tourists with dreams. Champagne too. She’s seen them onloading crates at the wharf. She imagines Lance’s wife, camcorder in hand, schlurping up into her videotape Lance’s blue marlin and his crisp summer cottons and the splash of yellow champagne and the dazzling teeth, whiter than bleached coral. How do they get them so white? Here I go, she thinks, rolling up her eyes for nobody’s benefit but her own. Here I go, thinking about teeth. What a subject.

She wonders, just the same, about amber spit and clear spit. Is it a national trait?

“Australians don’t floss,” Lance mumbles, clamp in mouth, through a break in the roadwork on his molars.

Beth’s hand flies to her lips. Has she done it again, blurted thought into the room? Possibly. She’s been jumpy, that’s why; ever since the dreams began again, the dreams of Giddie turning up. Or maybe she just imagined Lance spoke. Maybe she gave him the words. Her head is so cluttered with dialogue that bits of it leak out if she isn’t careful.

“It astonishes me, the lack of dental hygiene hereabouts,” Lance says. “We notice it with the hotel maids and the tourist guides, you know. As a dentist, it must break your heart.”

“Oh, we manage,” Dr Foley says. He lets the drill rise on its slick retractable cord and winks at Beth from behind his white sleeve. She lowers her eyes, expressionless, moving the vacuum hose, schlooping up the clear American words.

“You see this one?” Lance mumbles, pointing to an incisor. “Thought I’d lost this baby once, I could barely …” but the polished steel scraper gently pushes his consonants aside and only a stream of long shapeless untranslatable vowels grunt their way into the vacuum tube.

If we put all the tooth stories end to end, Beth thinks, we could have a twelve volume set. Oral history, Dr Foley calls it, laughing and laughing in his curious silent way at the end of a day, the last patient gone. Every American incisor and canine has its chronicle, lovingly kept, he maintains, laughing again. Many things amuse him. Beth can’t quite figure him out. She loves the curious things he says, the way he says them. She loves his voice. It’s the way people sound when they first come north from Brisbane or Sydney. He seems to her like someone who became a dentist by accident.

As he cranks down the chair, he murmurs: “The Annals of Dentition, we’re keeping a chapter for you, Lance.”

“I’m mightily obliged to you, Doctor, mightily obliged. Fitting me in at such short notice.” Lance shakes the dentist’s hand energetically. “And to you too, young lady.” He peers at the badge on Beth’s uniform. “Beth,” he reads. “Well, Miss Elizabeth, I’m grateful to you, ma’am. I surely am.”

“It’s not Elizabeth,” she says. “It’s short for Bethesda.”

“And a very fine city Bethesda is, yes ma’am, State of Maryland. I’ve been there once or twice. Now how did you come by a name like that?”

“The tooth fairy brought it,” Beth says.

Dr Foley’s eyebrows swoop up like exuberant gulls, then settle, solemn. Lance laughs and, a little warily, pats Beth on the shoulder.

“Well, Lance,” the dentist says in his professional voice. “Fight the good fight. Floss on. Mrs Wilkinson will handle the billing arrangements for you.” He ushers the American out, closes the door, and leans against it. “Don’t miss our thrilling first volume,” he says to Beth, madly flexing his acrobatic brows. His tone has gone plummy, mock epic, and she can hear his silent laughter pressed down underneath. “Wars of the Molars. Send just $19.95 and a small shipping and handling charge to Esplanade Dental Clinic, Cairns—”

“Ssh,” she giggles. “He’ll hear.”

“No worries. Now if Mrs Wilkinson hears me—”

“She might make you stand in the corner.”

“You’re a funny little thing,” he says, leaning against the door, watching her, as though he’s finally reached a judgment now that she’s been working a month. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen,” she says, defensive. “It’s on my application.”

“Oh, I never pay attention.” He brushes forms aside with one hand. “I go by the eyes in the interview.” Beth feels something tight and sudden in her chest, with heat branching out from it, spreading. “You can see intelligence. And I look for a certain liveliness. ‘You haven’t been in Cairns long, I seem to remember.”

“No.”

“Just finished high school, I’ve forgotten where.”

“Mossman.”

“Hmm. Mossman. No jobs in Mossman, I suppose.”

“No,” she admits. “Everyone comes down to Cairns.”

“Does your father cut cane?”

He might have winded her.

“Well,” he says quickly, into the silence, “none of my—”

“My father raises Cain,” she says tardy.

His eyebrows dart up again, amused, and spontaneously he reaches up to touch her cheek. It’s a fleeting innocent gesture, the sort of thing a pleased schoolteacher might do, but Beth can hardly bear it. She turns to the steriliser and readies the instruments, inserting them one by one with tongs. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s not funny at all, I suppose. And none of my business.”

She shrugs.

“I didn’t realise Beth was short for Bethesda,” he says.

“It’s from the Bible. Mum gave us Bible names.”

“It’s rather stylish.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m pleased with your work, you know.”

“Thank you.” She fills the room with a shush of steam.

“Listen,” he says, “after I close the surgery, I always stop for a drink or two at the Pink Flamingo before I go home. You want to join me?”

“Uh …” She feels dizzy with panic. Anyway, impossible. She’d miss dinner. “Uh, no thanks, I can’t. Dinner’s at six. We’re not allowed to miss.” She keeps her back to him, fussing with the temperature setting.

“Not allowed?”

“At the hostel.”

“Oh, I see,” he says doubtfully. “Well, I’ll drop you home then.”

God, that’s the last thing she wants. “No. No, really, that’d be silly. It’s way out of your way, and the bus goes right past.”

“You’re a funny little thing, Bethesda,” he says, but she’s reaching into the steriliser with the tongs, her face full of steam.

“Girls,” Matron says from the head of the table. “Let us give thanks.”

Beth imagines the flap flap flap of those messages which will not be spoken winging upwards from Matron’s scrunched-shut eyes. Thank you, O Lord, for mournful meals. Thank you for discipline, our moral starch, so desirable in the building of character. Thank you for stiff upper lips. Thank you for the absence of irritating laughter and chatter at the table of St Margaret’s Hostel for Country Girls. Thank you that these twenty young women, sent to Cairns from Woop-Woop and from God Knows Where, provide me with a reasonable income through government grants; in the name of derelict fathers, violent sons, unholy spirits, amen; and also through the urgings of social workers and absurdly hopeful outback schools. Thank you that these green and government-sponsored girls, all of them between the dangerous and sinward-leaning ages of sixteen and twenty-four, are safely back under my watchful eye and curfew, another day of no scandal, no police inquiries, no trouble, thanks be to God.

“We are grateful, O Lord,” Matron says, “for your abiding goodness to us, and for this meal. Amen.”

And the twenty young women lift grateful knives and forks. Beth, hungry, keeps her eyes lowered and catalogues sounds. That is finicky Peggy, that metal scrape of the fork imposing grids and priorities. Peggy eats potato first, meat second, carrots last. Between a soft lump of overcooked what? — turnip, probably — and some gristle, Beth notes the muffled flpp flpp of gravy stirred into cumulus mashed clouds, that is Liz, who has been sent down from the Tablelands to finish school at Cairns High. Liz’s father is a tobacco picker somewhere near Mareeba, and Liz, for a range of black market fees, can supply roll-your-owns of head-spinning strength. That ghastly open-mouth chomping is Sue, barely civilised, who has only been here a week, dragged in by a district nurse who left her in matron’s office. Where’s this bedraggled kitten from then? matron asked, holding it at arm’s length. From Cooktown, the district nurse said. Flown down to us. You wouldn’t believe what we deal with up there. North of nowhere, believe me. In every sense.

“Inbreeding,” Peggy sends the whisper along. “Like rabbits. Like cane toads, north of the Daintree. If this one’s not a sample, Bob’s your uncle. Whad’ya reckon?”