Clowns At Midnight (8 page)

Just doing it soothed me. Everything was different. I even found myself singing
Holy Meg
, matching the words to the melody I’d put together.

‘
Holy Meg
, time to beg,

All the shot and powder’s gone.

Come the day we’ll fail to see the power of the gun.

Holy Meg
, time to beg,

Gone the hope we’re founded on,

Out at dawn and sound the horn to the rising of the sun.’

I smiled. It sounded good. It did. The chorus worked. Mick and Jeremy could tweak the verses, but it was working.

‘See the armies in their lines of silver,

Sweeping southwards to the sea.

See the engines of their might, how they shiver,

Feel the passion of the siege.

Old Avenger
shakes the hill,

Prince of Peace
snarls at the door-or-or.

‘
Holy Meg
, time to beg…’

I loved it. Loved the irony, singing of old guns and desperate final hours as I drove along a dirt road between dry summer hills, sending up a dust-cloud behind, freed from the cabin, out of the box. Jolly Jack out of his box.

I stopped at the Risi driveway, crossed to the mailbox and put the envelope inside. There was no other mail.

I stood for a moment by the locked front gate, looking longingly down the road. I couldn’t see the house, just the distant tree-tops that surrounded it, holding it in its island of green. That would be for another time. For now it was back to the car, then the road and the dust and the song.

‘How the banners form a wave of colour,

Soon we’ll hear the drumming cease.

Let the thunders have their day and over,

Leave the valley to its peace.

Fierce Persuader
rakes the hill,

St Martin’s Fist
pounds at the door-or-or.

‘
Holy Meg
, time to beg…’

I made fine gutsy work of it, pounding on the wheel as I raced along Edenville Road, sending up pennons of dust. David Leeton, Conquistador, Love’s Fool on his quest for Gemma.

I found nothing, of course. Every turn, every new vista or view down a hillside saw hope come and go. There were houses on their hilltops, strongholds battered by the day. There were peregrine falcons aloft and an eagle even higher, a speck against the blue. Once I saw a swamp pheasant on the road, long-plumed and a rich brown, my first ever, source of the distinctive
whump-whump-whump
call I’d heard in the evenings. There was people-sign everywhere: washing on lines, shed doors open on deep cool interiors, but no actual people, not even a tractor moving in a far-off field. It was as empty and abandoned-looking as the Rankins’ map.

Finally I reached the turn-off into Kyogle, and headed there because I needed some kind of destination. I plunged along the Summerland Way, waving to the driver of the first car I saw. He didn’t wave back and I had to smile. Intimacy was calibrated by roads here. On a graded backroad like Edenville Road, everyone waved; you shared their realm of cattle dips, mending fences and hoping for enough rain to keep the tanks full. You were back
in
the world somehow. The moment you hit a sealed road, you were just traffic again, passing through, part of a different equation entirely. Maybe you waved to someone driving the same make of vehicle as you, but that was it. You had to have a good dirt road, be back in from it, before you belonged.

Kyogle lay quiet among its hills in the blazing afternoon, leached of street life for the terrible hours between eleven and six, just like the Rankins’ map again: unchanged, unchanging.

It was all an automatic, half thought out thing then, parking, getting out of the car, walking from blazing summer glare into the refreshing gloom of the Exchange Hotel.

I didn’t really expect to find Gemma behind the bar—who knew what her rostered days were? Coming here had been a gesture, part of an act of completion. So it shook me to see her sitting with friends over by the pool tables, three guys and two girls her own age, happily chatting away. She laughed with them, gestured dramatically, leant in to deliver certain remarks, seemed easy and natural with them. It was all so brash and ordinary, so mundane, that I felt more foolish than ever.

But what could I have expected? She had her life here, her friends and family. Of course she fitted this reality. The idea of finding her alone, sitting quietly, waiting for some resolution David Leeton could provide, some act between us, was foolishness, utter arrogance. The Gemma Ewins of the Risi dinner had been the considerate, neighbourly exception, obliging Carlo and Raina, being kind to a stranger as a favour. Who could blame her?

This
was the norm. What I had sensed was projection, vanity. Need.

I ordered a beer and stood with it at the bar so I could be seen, not wanting to approach the group, hoping she might excuse herself and come over at least, even if just to ask how I was settling in, anything to qualify the dreadful ordinariness of the scene.

I saw her notice me, saw her recognition and waved. She waved back, but cursorily, then leant in to say something to her friends. There were general glances in my direction, made with no attempt at tact, followed by more leaning in and laughter. I heard the unmistakable bray of Gemma’s laugh as she continued talking, glancing over as she did so. Her friends did likewise, stupid naked leers on their faces.

I felt utterly foolish. There was a rush of anger, swelling to fury, but all quiet, all contained. What I deserved for projecting onto strangers. I drained my glass with as much dignity as I could manage, making it a ‘just here for a quick beer’ thing, then turned from the bar. I forced myself not to hurry, just walked out into the heat and glare again, returned to the car and headed home.

I was doubly furious with myself. This had the intensity of adolescence with all its excruciations, the familiar déjà-vu agonies recalled from countless, intense teenage trysts back when so much—even the clown-fear—was bright and new.

But while I just wanted to be home and out of what the day had become, I didn’t take the Summerland Way. I took the Edenville turn-off again and thundered along it, making as much of a dust cloud as I dared (this adolescent still had to pay for ruined suspension). Most of it was a blur.

As I neared the Risi mailbox, I pulled over and killed the engine, let the dust cloud sweep past me and fall away to nothing in the sudden quiet. I sat listening to the day. Smiled at myself. Finally laughed.
Fool, fool, fool
.

The Risi mailbox had saved me, brought me out of it. Bless the Risi mailbox! The breeze stirred the grass along the road and around the fences, brought the smells of hot fields and dust, the sense of infinities and bittersweet belonging. There was a jet contrail high up, an incandescent plume, barely in the world.

The adult was back in control, chastened and foolish but endlessly forgiving. I couldn’t begin to understand the sense of loss I felt. They said that self-obsessing was the religion of the new millennium, but, whatever this was, it went beyond Julia, lost and gone. It came of fear, of the intense sense of place, of being at this only point in my life as something finite and passing. Again, again, again. Ready to be in love with love. In lust. In rapture with rapture. Still. With something rich and adequate to match the expansiveness I’d felt. Holy Meg, how I needed it! Justification. Redemption. A chance.

It was good just to sit there, treasuring the quiet, savouring the breeze that shivered the hairs on my arms and sent seed pods sailing from the crowns of the dried-out thistles along the road. I breathed deeply of the day. On impulse, I opened the door and stepped out, stood in the afternoon. On crazy impulse, from the frantic hope of something, anything, I crossed to the Risi mailbox, wanting a letter addressed to me, another invitation, another chance. Something.

There was nothing. My envelope had gone. No, not nothing; there was a dried-out sprig of gumnuts right near the back: a tight cluster of the tiny gourd-helmet shapes on a twig, maybe twenty, thirty or so, just sitting there on the warm tin like—the thought slipped in—a jester’s rattle, left there for whatever reason.

Again I smiled at myself, at what Jack would say if I told him about my quest for Gemma. I’d probably adjust reality, say I was writing all day. It’s what adolescents did. What adults did. Edited out the bad bits.

Or perhaps I’d log it all exactly as it happened, see how it felt and pull it later. Jack always granted that I wouldn’t tell everything. It was easy to imagine what he’d say. Adolescence, for good or ill, remains forever in the full pendulum swing of what a person is. You never recover from childhood or adolescence, from any part of that crucial making. How could you? That winning, losing, earning. Yearning.

I closed the mailbox, returned to the car and started the engine, continued slowly along Edenville Road. Had I been seen? Well, no matter. Make them wonder. I had just re-learned a lesson learned a hundred, thousand, ten thousand times across my life. Try to see what truly is.

Finally I was at the Rankins’ front gate and checking for mail. There was nothing.

Then I saw it, pushed right back: a sprig of gumnuts like the one in the Risi mailbox, dozens of the little dried-out bell-chambers on a branching twig. I brought them out into the sunlight, shook them so the small grey-brown gourds rattled.

Something after all. The possibility of—well—possibility.

I looked up at the hillside and smiled.

God bless the Risis!

That evening I lost myself in work, revising a chapter of the book that had dragged and had always felt like business for its own sake. Now I managed to create some suspense, a better sense of pace, and I was enjoying Rollo Jaine more than ever. I always liked it when my main characters started surprising me again.

I worked on the article too, making good progress until the portable air-conditioner in the study gave out. I remembered that Beth’s
Things You Might Need
list on the fridge said there was an extra fan in the storage room. That would do for now, and save me putting on the main air-conditioner in the living room.

I fetched the key from the kitchen, unlocked the door and looked in on the boxes and shrouded shapes. Beth had left the wire-framed fan on the floor to the left of the doorway where it was easy to find. As I moved to get it, I noticed the plastic clipboard on top of some boxes: Beth Rankin’s inventory of what she’d put in storage. I didn’t stop to consider whether I should browse it or not, but immediately regretted doing so. Not because dolls or masks were mentioned—Beth was alert enough to have used code for those—but because something
had
escaped her attention.

Two simple words:
Sewing Stand
.

Not
Sewing Mannequin
,
Sewing Dummy
or
Dress Mannequin
, not even something neutral and safe like
Sewing Things
.

Sewing Stand
. How could she have known?

I tensed, felt the panic ghosts rising from deep down, the clamminess, the constriction and sudden shortness of breath. Time to back away, to lock the door and be gone.

I couldn’t do it. Instead, I studied the draped forms. Somewhere in here, probably tucked back in a corner, was that most unsettling of indoor scarecrows, something so innocent until you considered
what
it was: a woman’s torso with adjustable baize-covered panels, set about a metal pole on a stand, often a round metal base whose casters whirred over tiles and polished floors. With its panels and segments it was a workaday Venus de Milo and, worse, a quadruple amputee mockery—no, quintuple, there was no head either!—something mutilated, but so decorously, oh so politely. You could leave one in a drawing room.

I didn’t need recollections of
The Silence of the Lambs
or
Boxing Helena
, Tod Browning’s
Freaks
or that opening segment of the old 1972 Amicus film
Asylum
to stir the dread. It was sharply there, brought on by simply imagining the form, the distinctive lines and curves, the soft fuzziness over hard, adjustable plates linked by grooved, metal strips with little plastic adjustment wheels in between.

My mind raced at the prospect of this most intimate torture device being here, so close by. For that’s what she was! An absolutely domesticized Iron Maiden, armoured and armless. Oh yes! Made for ironing! And irony! Yes!

And she moved under your hands, had her way with you even while you had your way with her. It went beyond the sexual, beyond perversion and paraphilia, yet at the same time resonated with all those things. How could it not? She was
la
Mâitresse machine
indeed.

Her name in all her manifestations was—what else?—Madame Sew, and I had long avoided those cosy sewing rooms where she lived, or those thrift-shop windows where she stood like a fetishistic Amsterdam whore displaying her close-cropped charms.

All things considered, my acquaintance with the lady had been surprisingly easy until now. I had once left an acclaimed French restaurant in Los Angeles because the menu had been wheeled in on just such a torso, a fine signature touch for everyone else but for me an utter horror, the Madame’s gutted form presented with all her lovers’ billets-doux attached. Growing up, I’d missed out on Christmas and birthday presents from an aunt because I’d refused to set foot in her home again. Madame Sew was too often there in the living room, stuck with pins and fragments of cloth like some Frankenstein work in progress.

Those were my two main memories; the rest sat in the imagination.

It occurred to me standing there that in all the things I’d told Jack over the years, I’d never mentioned her by name, had never wanted to give her that much force in my life. Naming changed everything.

Well, she was here now, hiding back in the press of things in this small close space. It brought the sweats, the pressure in the chest, the continuing shortness of breath.