Dark Places (34 page)

At this distance, and with a young man's arms half around her, my daughter looked every inch a woman. You could see the strong muscles of her back outlined through the stuff of her dress, and one powerful leg, like a small body in itself, was thrust forward to take her weight. Her hem was hanging crooked, and there was a leaf in her hair. Certainly she was enormous, but I looked at her with new eyes, and saw that when out-of-doors, with the soft shadows on her hair, and the blood in her cheeks, Lilian was by no means repugnant.

I was coiled, ready, but before I had time to spring out with accusation in my mouth, they had pulled apart, gone to their strewn clothes, and begun to put them on. There was something chillingly matter-of-fact about the way they sat down and methodically went about it. Duncan stuck out his chin and stretched his knobbly neck to tighten his tie; Lilian pushed her hair back into shape, her mouth full of hair-pins: it was like watching an old married couple in a frowsy bedroom.

Rage rose within me in a toxic whiteness. Cheated! I had waited all this time to see them take their clothes off, and here they were putting them back on! I must indeed have waited too long with my watch in my hand, earlier on: even while I had been watching the seconds ticking away they must have been doing it! I had waited all day, and waited in vain: I had missed it, and missed it through my own damned cleverness, when a stupider man would have blundered onwards and caught them bare-bummed!

When they were dressed they looked at each other, and that was worse than anything that had gone before. As Duncan smiled at Lilian, I saw the full radiance of one human sending out a signal to another. His was a soft and lingering look, a look that sealed a promise. There was something obscene in the naked tenderness of his face as it looked at her.

But that flabby look of abject adoration on Duncan's face released in my daughter a person her father had never seen. This new daughter of mine gestured and smiled, tucked her hair behind her ears with an appealing gesture borrowed from some prettier girl, tossed her head so that the hair came loose again and shone in the sunlight. She was flushed and pink, positively winsome as she reached up to brush something off Duncan's shoulder, so that he must have felt her panting breath hot on his cheek. With a pang, watching her, I thought,
When did my daughter last smile at me?

I watched her with a fullness in my heart I could not name, an ache like hunger or fear: it was some kind of chemical reaction going on within my organism that was new to me, and so painful I thought I might groan aloud.

Lilian picked up her bookbag, Duncan screwed his tie into his neck, and they began to climb, heads bowed, up the hill towards me. I could hear Lilian breathing now, and the bump of her bookbag against her legs, the crackle and clatter as her shoes crushed bark and leaves, the swish of the branches she pushed away in front of her. I was close enough now to hear the hiss of her skirt around her legs; I could almost have reached out a hand and touched her as she passed, stroked her hair, sinuous as it slipped out of its combs and unravelled down her back, and I thought I could even smell the musk of her as she passed.

She was laughing as she went by me, and calling over her shoulder at something Duncan had said. ‘Oh no,' she was crying. ‘Absolutely not by any manner of means, my dear!' She was as radiant as if there could be no such person in the world as a father.

If I had spoken—
Look over here
,
Lilian
,
here I am—
and she had turned, I felt with a chill that she would not have recognised me. Once, in fact, as she glanced back at Duncan, it seemed to me that her eyes met mine, but the awareness of me was pushed away like a bit of flotsam, and her eyes skidded over me. She looked, but she did not see.

Simple invisibility was not what was going on here. Invisibility was only half the picture. I myself had given thought to the matter of being invisible, had applied my not inconsiderable intelligence to the matter, and had succeeded. What was going on here, what was causing the breath to gag in my throat, was something else again. There was my daughter, breathing, laughing, glancing around at Duncan. Her mouth was opening and closing around words, her brain was marshalling thoughts, arranging phrases: and as far as all that vigorous internal activity of hers was concerned, I was simply not a factor. I just did not feature on her map of the world: never had, never would. Watching her, snuffing up the fragrance of her, seeing the corner of her eyes wrinkling as she smiled at Duncan, I saw that she was not Lilian Singer making a monkey of her father. She was not a nice girl with an expensive education, throwing it all away to spite Daddy. She was simply an organism going about its own blind business of seeking out what brought it pleasure.

I was no longer behind the tree; I was now standing boldly right out in the open, staring up the hill at them. If they had cared to turn, if they had so much as glanced my way, they could not have failed to see me. I did not blink, did not move a muscle; my eyes were dry and stiff from watching, my face scraped bare with waiting for her to turn: but she did not turn. I saw my hand make a convulsive gesture like a wave gone wrong. Would they not turn? Would she not see me at all?
Look
,
Lilian
, I thought, willing the words from my brain into hers.
Turn
,
Lilian
,
for God's sake
,
look
,
I am here.
But she did not turn.

I watched their backs move steadily away from me up the path and on the breeze I caught gusts of syllables, fragments of laughing, a cry as she flung out an arm with an extravagant gesture. She and Duncan were supremely solid up there, in the sun that made black shadows in their folds: they were etched on the air with needle-sharp clarity. When they moved, or flung out an arm, a weighty black shadow fell away from them, also moving or flinging out an arm.

They became small in the distance, but even small they were still the most convincing elements among all this flimsy vegetation, and their voices cut cleanly through the still air. I, on the other hand, had become transparent, nothing more than a few molecules clinging to the bark of a tree.

I watched them until they were out of sight. As they disappeared around the shoulder of the hill, the quality of the air around me underwent a change. All at once I was very completely alone, and alone in a way that was more than simply a man being by himself. It was astonishing just how quickly the bush folded itself around a person. Silence surrounded me like a fluid. The sun went behind a cloud, and there was a sudden chill in the air; the trees loomed over me in an unfriendly way and darkness seeped upwards out of the ground. These spindly ailing bushes, this coarse dead-looking grass, these untidy trees with their random clumps of leaves, swallowed up man and his works the way sand soaks up water: soaked it up and gave nothing back but this watchful silence.

I touched the trunk of one of the trees, just to feel something press against my shell, and it was as cold as a reptile. I was scooped hollow by invisibility and by silence. I was the tiniest, least important bit of rubbish here, just a brittle shell lost among the bush. Everywhere here, nature was getting on with its business: ants hurried around to feed their young, trees strangled each other competing for light, bushes thrust flowers out to tempt bees: everything was blindly going about the endless business of dominion and reproduction. Only I myself was of no account, simply a husk waiting for decay.

Twenty-Nine

DAWN CAME IN by the front door and fingered my cheek; some bird warbled in a watery way, a kookaburra began to choke, and a day had begun. I awoke from a dream of my daughter in which her lust was made manifest. ‘Come to me,' her face, rubbery with dream-lust, mouthed. ‘Come to me and make me whole.' From such a dream I awoke choked by my clothes, a twisted body in an armchair like a crumpled doll, stiff in every joint. My boots had an imbecile look sprawled on the carpet and my fingers had congealed in the night.

My daughter had slipped out the previous evening, before I had had a chance to confront her, and I had sat up in an armchair by the front door, for Albion Gidley Singer was not going to be made mock of by his daughter any longer. But she had not returned. I listened now and the house spoke back to me.
She is not here
, it said.
She has not returned.

I knew then that the dawn was fingering my cheek in a way that meant this day would be like no other, and that those scornful warbling birds knew that something was happening that was new in the world. I stretched and gathered my boots, and tugged at the clothes that had become twisted in the night, roped by dreams, and knew that before darkness fell on the world again, I would have joined myself to my echo and become whole.

Out on the terrace, Norah's wicker chair gaped and the flag-stones tried to buckle beneath my feet. My daughter spoke aloud to me here in the shred of pink nightdress-silk, just the shade of flesh, dangling from a splinter in a post of the verandah.
Look
, this flesh-coloured tatter crowed.
Look
,
Father.
The dawn spoke to me with my daughter's voice.
Yes
,
Father
, it said.
See what I have left for you to find
, and the pink silk trembled in a breeze from nowhere.

I laughed aloud then, so that birds flew up from the lawn and a cat leapt down from somewhere and ran under a shrub. I laughed to feel the air fill my belly, for my daughter had left me a message, and it was not a message I was going to ignore.

I laughed aloud, and the milkman stared at me from the driveway, standing in a nimbus of steam from his horse's droppings, and I laughed again, and called down to him heartily, ‘Fine morning for it,' and the red-faced large-handed man showed me a few teeth and called back in a startled way, ‘Too right, sir.'

I stood watching sun swallow the shadows of the grass in the lawn and the dew rising off the flagstones: stood, a father whose hour had come.

When John came down, and Alma rang the little brass bell for breakfast, I stood at the head of the table, preparing for a day different from all the others. On the walls, the exotic faces approved. Their eyes all watched me and encouraged. John came in like a sick bird, all sideways and ugly, and gripped his chair until I spoke, so loudly that the exotic faces stared. ‘Sit, John,' I said, ‘and eat your egg. Your sister will be attended to later.' I had to laugh, thinking of how I would attend to my daughter later, and how somewhere not far away she waited, attentive, for me to attend to her.

‘John,' I said, and he spilled the piece of egg that was on its way to his mouth. ‘John,' I said when his glasses were turned towards me, listening. ‘Lilian cannot be found, John, so you and I will go to the Agricultural Show, as planned, without her.' John was visibly disappointed that I would not abandon the plans I had made for the day. I made him admire the
Largest Egg Ever Laid In Australia
, reproduced in the paper that morning, but it seemed to suggest nothing to him. ‘Can you imagine what elastic-sided chook must have given birth to this monstrous egg?' I asked jovially, hoping to create a flicker of interest on my son's face, but his was the blank face I would have had, if I had not learned how to hide behind a frown. ‘John,' I said, ‘you will be a man one day, does this grotesque egg suggest nothing to you?' but his stare indicated that it meant nothing at all.

For the sake of this feeble son, though, it was necessary to put up a show of looking for Lilian, and although anticipation was beginning to tick along my veins into each fold and pucker of my being, as another kind of plan for the day began to take shape, I acted the part. ‘We will look for your sister,' I told John when we had finished our eggs and were standing in the front hall. ‘We will give her one last chance.'

I did not join the search myself. That did not seem a necessary part of the ritual, and after all I might have made the mistake of finding her. Close to my shoulder the shred of pink silk hung like a promise. I watched the shadow of my thin son—how insubstantial he was on the grass—wandering crookedly from bush to bush, hesitating, drooping like a weed. His shadow fluttered and faltered, he peered and frowned. The son of a hollow father, he seemed next to nothingness itself.

I waited for John, and would not have him guess at my impatience to be gone. ‘Lilian does not have the power to make me change my plans,' I announced to John and to the stairway in general. ‘Lilian is not of sufficient importance for that.' John still stared, and in the silence between us, in which I wanted to poke his nose, to see any kind of expression on his face, we heard Cook and Alma downstairs setting out for their day off. ‘Hurry up,' Cook called to Alma, and her voice echoed up the stairs to where a father stood with his son.

A band of blood-coloured light lay across the father's boot, from the stained glass beside the front door. Across the chin of the son was a band of leaf-green. Both faces were speckled as if ill from the etched fern pattern in the glass. The father and son stood in this unlikely light, watching each other for a sign, while between them Alma's voice was robust. ‘Coming, love, keep your blooming hair on!'

A door slammed down in the scullery and the father made himself move. ‘Well, John,' I said, and moved my boot out of the blood-coloured light. ‘We are going to enjoy the wonders of Nature today, Lilian or no Lilian.' John blinked and moved so that his whole face was green, then red. ‘Yes, Father,' he said, in that way he had, that left me unsatisfied. A robust son with a bit of revolt in him would have made a man of me. ‘Yes, Father,' this failed son said, and went upstairs so I was left with nothing, filling some stranger's boots and clothes in coloured light.

We left the house at last, John trailing behind me, my cane decisive on the path. ‘Do not look back, John,' I told my son, and pulled at him by his bony elbow. ‘Forget about your sister.'