Dark Matter (33 page)

Above the cards sat a corkboard covered
with photos and postcards. It had been filled, and photos were pinned to its
edges, hanging into space like the fringe of an
avant-garde
rug. At some
point, when the board had been filled, new photos had been overlaid, carefully,
to avoid occluding faces. The professor had been happy to cover anything from
the Grand Canyon to London Bridge, as long as the smiling faces of his children—for
that was clearly who they were—were exposed to the gentle radiance of the bar
heater.

The creak of the professor’s chair as it
rotated signaled to Rasputin that he had finished.

“The world is not ending today,” he said,
and rose. “So. A coffee, I think, and then you can unload that trouble from
your breast.”

“Sorry, sir—Professor?”

“Call me Reim. A young lad shouldn’t have
dark circles around his eyes. Makes you look like a racquet.”

“Racoon?”

“Racoon, yes. So, come. Indulge an old man
in an entrenched habit, and keep me company.”

Reim left the office without waiting for an
answer, and presently Rasputin was hobbling next to him, straining to keep up.
They emerged from the building, descended a flight of stairs, and joined one of
the many thoroughfares riddling the campus. Reim struck out east, head thrust
forward over his paunch, which rolled over his belt buckle, obscuring it. With
his hands folded together at the small of his back, he looked to Rasputin like
he was embarking on a safari. He lacked only a pith helmet and elephant gun.

Reim travelled as the crow flies. He lanced
between packs of students playing kick to kick, not breaking step as his gaze
tracked a punted football arcing overhead.

Rasputin began to fear Reim’s ‘entrenched
habit’ was power walking. They had walked for barely three minutes and his leg
was burning. His spirits sank further when they crossed Hackett Drive, and left
the campus behind.

Before them the silvered waters of Matilda
Bay stretched left and right, framed above by the canopy of gum trees, and
below by grass that grew almost to the water. Nearby, a restaurant commanded a
view of the bay, and farther round the bay sat the Royal Perth Yacht Club.
Farther still, the riverscape was boxed in by the prominent knoll of King’s
Park and the city. Cars crawled like so many species of beetle across the
Narrows Bridge, which plumbed the city’s main artery into the heart of
downtown.

The professor made a bee-line for the
restaurant, and Rasputin followed on his heels. Inside, while Rasputin stood,
feeling self-conscious about the tattered and dirty hems of his jeans, Reim
ambled to the bar and was greeted by an attendant. He ordered and rejoined
Rasputin to wait. Presently the attendant reappeared holding two tall paper
cups. Reim took them, thanked the attendant, and disappeared outside. Rasputin
found him waiting on the grass.

“This place is getting too fancy for its
own good, but then,” said Reim, surveying the bay, “with a view like this, who
can blame them?”

He offered one of the cups to Rasputin,
then, squinting to find the hole in the lid of his cup, drank. Rasputin didn’t
need to taste the cup’s contents to know it held coffee. He drank and enjoyed
being still. The coffee was good.

“Has this been your coffee haunt for long?”
said Rasputin. “Thanks for the coffee, by the way.”

“Don’t mention it. And to answer your
question: yes, if you count sixteen years as long, though I don’t think I do
any more.”

They were silent again, watching the bob
and sway of yachts tethered to the club’s jetties.

Reim moved off. He walked toward the water,
then began to follow the curve of the beach. Rasputin reorganised himself and
followed. He stepped in the clean, treadless prints left by Reim’s battered
leather loafers, puncturing every other one with the butt of his cane. A minute
later he was standing on a jetty, looking into the obscenely small hold of a
16-foot yacht. It bobbed in the wash reflecting from the jetty’s pilings. Rasputin
read the vessel’s name, which was painted on its side in a curling script: Van
Leeuwin III. The gaze Reim fixed it with was full of possession, and it caused
Rasputin a sinking feeling.

“
This
is your habit?” Rasputin said.

Reim winked, and then squatted with that
same youthfulness, and dropped into the boat’s stern.

He proffered a hand to Rasputin, and said,
“Come. I promise you won’t regret it.”

With one longing glance at the shore,
Rasputin passed his cane to Reim, and then awkwardly lowered himself off the
jetty and into the boat. It rocked alarmingly as he shifted his weight. Reim
stood by the tiller and rode the roll without seeming to notice it.

Rasputin looked at the yacht in the next
pen. It had to be close to 40 feet long. A miasma of money clung to it, in its
spit-polished fittings, moulded hull, and leathern seats. By contrast, Reim’s
wooden get-about was in dire need of fresh paint, and the bilge smelled as
though it held a drowned rat.

“Must cost a penny to moor here,” said
Rasputin.

Reim turned from fussing with the sail.

“It’s not my pen,” he said in faux shock.
“I’m Dutch! Don’t you know my uncle argued with a Scotsman over a penny and
invented wire? No, it is a loan from a colleague—absent and esteemed.” He added
with a chuckle, “One day he’ll return and be neither.”

Reim cast off, pushed the yacht clear of
the jetty, and raised its single sail. Its cloth billowed and pulled them away
from the gleaming 40-footers. Rasputin fancied their little vessel blowing a
raspberry at the proud craft left staked behind.

Rasputin noticed the water darken as the
silty riverbed fell away. His heart beat faster.

“Do I need a life jacket?”

“No. You need to not fall in.”

Reim trimmed the sail, and Rasputin began
to relax. He shifted on the seat to a more comfortable position, and began to
take in the vista spreading in every direction. He recognised the landmarks:
the old boathouse, sticking out into the bay from the Stirling Highway side;
the tumble-down buttress of King’s Park; and its faint echo to the South,
Heathcote bluff, once an asylum for the insane, now an asylum for picnicking
families; the grey strip of the freeway to the east, and the bridge where it
arced over Narrows Point. He knew and could name them all, but was struck by
how unfamiliar they looked. He had never been o
n
the river. It had
always been scenery slipping past on the other side of a window.

Reim was silent, and only moved
occasionally to trim the sail or nudge the tiller in response to some change in
the wind or current to which Rasputin was insensible.

After a time, when, for Rasputin, the
silence became more uncomfortable than his desire not to intrude on Reim’s
reverie, he said: “Have you been sailing for sixteen years, too?”

Reim responded without a sign he had been
interrupted. “Longer. I used to come out here with my boys when that freeway
over there still smelled of the asphalt. Now it goes nearly to Bunbury, over a
hundred kilometres.”

“That must make you feel old,” said
Rasputin.

Reim took his eyes from the water to squint
at Rasputin.

“Old? No, there are no end of roads. They
don’t make me feel old,” he said, tucking one leg over the other. “I feel old
the third time I take a piss before sunrise. I feel old when my kids call me
and give me advice.” He pinched the bridge of his nose then, and Rasputin realised
he was making a show of moroseness.

“It’s a funny thing,” Reim said. “I am
conscious of having gotten old, but that happened without me ever feeling
grown-up.”

“Where are your kids now?”

“Uh-huh,” said Reim, and unlocked his legs
so he could face Rasputin. “The De Groot Diaspora.” He chuckled.

“All safely married,” he said, and Rasputin
smirked at the odd description.

“My oldest, Pieter, does law in Toronto—and
he’s welcome to the weather.”

Rasputin raked through the memory of Reim’s
photo board and found the older-looking brother. Toronto’s iconic CN Tower
loomed impossibly high in the background.

“Then comes Jop, my next boy. He got my
wife’s brains, and researches in the mathematics at Stanford.”

Rasputin found him on the photo board too,
a dark-haired man with a pleasant smile and a slim build—
like me
,
thought Rasputin. He was standing at a pier.

“And last, my princess, Ineke. She lives
now in Burma. She and her husband have fifty-six children at last count.” Reim
took a moment evidently to savour Rasputin’s incredulity before delivering the
old punch line: “Orphans.”

Rasputin found her easily, for half of the
photos of her were filled with the smiling faces of children, every one
brown-skinned, cheeks daubed with a white substance, and clustered about Ineke
as though she were sitting in the middle of a meadow in flower-burst.

“And here you are,” said Rasputin,
“flogging freshmen. Positively tame by comparison.”

Reim inclined his head in acceptance, but
his smile lingered.

“And Mrs. De Groot?”

“Is with the Lord,” Reim said, and silence
followed his words but for the occasional snap of the sail.

Rasputin peered into the water as their
craft crossed into the channel. Ahead, breaching the shadows beneath the
Narrows Bridge, came the sleek bulk of a ferry. It swept past, and Rasputin
craned his neck to look at the cluster of antennae bristling from the roof
above its bridge. Seconds later they were rocked by its bow wave, and Rasputin
went rigid, clutching at the gunnels.

When the boat had ceased rolling, Reim
yelled, “Lee ho!” startling Rasputin, and tacked to the south, on an angle that
took them near the freeway shore.

Once Reim had trimmed the sail, he turned
to Rasputin and said, “Would you like to learn?”

Rasputin answered out of habit. “No.”

“Just hold this for me then.” He handed
Rasputin the mainsheet, which had not left his hand since they set sail.

The breeze blustered in his ears, ebbing
and flowing, and Rasputin felt the mainsheet become taut and lax in echo. The
coarse rope tugged at the skin of his palms.

Their new course put what angle the sun’s
rays had directly into Rasputin’s eyes. Reim suddenly stood and then sat next
to Rasputin, giving the boat a decided lean.

“Take my seat. I can’t bear you squinting
like that. I’m used to it. You kids spend too much time in front of computers.”

Rasputin obeyed. He rose gingerly, pivoted,
and sank onto the seat by the tiller. Anything to restore the boat’s
equilibrium.

“You might want to grab that too,” Reim
said, indicating the tiller. “So we don’t hit that 30-footer,” he said, jabbing
a thumb over his shoulder without looking. “Just a thought.”

Rasputin gripped the wooden arm of the
tiller and yanked it over. The boat swung and spilled wind. The boom began to
swing fitfully.

“Pull her back,” said Reim, “before you
brain me.”

Rasputin did so, and the boom swung back to
where it had been, like a compass needle finding north.

“And tighten her up a bit,” Reim said,
nodding at the rope still clutched in Rasputin’s hand. He did, felt it thrum
with the strain. “We’ll make a salty of you yet.”

“So long as there’s no scrubbing of the
poop deck,” Rasputin said, attempting to sound sardonic, yet struggling to
contain laughter perched at the top of his throat.

He relaxed as he got used to the feel of
the rope and tiller. He began to sense how one played off the other, and how
both were influenced by the breeze. When there was a lull in the wind, the roar
of traffic flowing from the freeway penetrated to their boat, and when it died
altogether, even the hiss of the bay’s choppy waves breaking struggled out to
them. The stench of rotting seaweed, the same smell that filtered into the bus
on the way to university, only more pungent, filled his nostrils, but the lap
of water on the boat’s hull and the caress of nature-made wind transformed it;
it smelt like life not death.

“Why did you come to me today?” said Reim.

The abruptness of the question made
Rasputin withdraw from the feel of the boat. For a moment, it ceased being an
extension of him. He eased himself back into it, through rope and tiller, while
he tried to formulate a response to Reim’s question.

“A friend of mine, Dee Morgan, said I
should look you up.” Reim’s brow crinkled. “She was a student of yours, a few
years back.” When the professor still gave no sign of recognising the name,
Rasputin said, “She said you helped her in her honours year.”

“Oh. Deanne?” he said, “With the little
spiders?” He held his hand up, palm down, and wriggled his fingers in imitation
of a spider.

“That’s right,” Rasputin said. He plucked
the Latin name of the spider species from the tip of his mind like a ripe blueberry,
“
Lampoda cylindrata.
”

Prior to the accident, his best guess at
Dee’s honours topic would have been beetroots, and not from lack of her telling
him. What a jerk, he thought, and made a mental note to apologise for not being
more supportive during that year.