Fresh Fields (30 page)

“Yeah. And he seemed so chirpy on Wednesday when I saw him. He asked after you. I think I told ya that, didn't I?”

“Yes. Thanks.”

“He's got no relatives, apparently. I been droppin' in ta see him because I knew him a bit round the shearin' sheds years ago. Before he lost his leg.”

“Yes, you mentioned knowing him.”

Alf flicked his butt sharply away.

“Ah, well, it's what we're all gonna fuckinwell come to, sometime!” he said, as though to himself. Then he seemed to remember the youth was there. “Blokes o' mine and Teddy's vintage, I mean. Blokes who've let it all slip by 'em somehow. But you still got the chance of havin' a life.”

He looked as if he might say more, but a big truck nosed into the drive and he had to move the Pontiac out of the way. He handed the youth's bag out, said, “See ya later,” and drove off.

At the railway station the youth was told there was a train to the city in twenty minutes, so he bought a ticket. He sat slumped in his seat, watching the outskirts of Weegun fall away. How sad, he thought, how sad. He called up the words and tune of the song, and wished Keith was there to sing it one last time. The youth hummed it, for a man who was going downhill fast, and who had asked after the room-mate who hadn't even bothered to know his name.

 

Goodbye to you Juan, goodbye Rosalita,

Adios mis amigos, Jesus and Maria.

You won't have a name

When you ride the big airplane,

All they will call you

Will be deportee.

He had rented a room in a converted garage at the back of a big old run-down mansion from the Victorian era. The garage had been divided into three tiny rooms and the youth had the middle one. It contained a bed and a dressing table and a wardrobe and this left hardly enough space to turn around in. The youth didn't mind. The room was cheap and snug and he had no possessions other than what he could keep in his one bag. The lavatory and shower were over in the rear part of the house. There was a large backyard with a sagging clothesline and lots of unruly vines with purplish flowers on them. If you pushed past the tangle of vines you found a back gate and a laneway.

There were occupants in the other two rooms of the garage. One was a young chap named Sunny, from Ceylon. The youth knew this because he heard the chap talking to Delia, the landlady. Sunny and Delia spent a lot of time together in the backyard. Sunny's English wasn't the best but you could get the drift of what he said.

The man on the other side was a night-worker that no-one ever saw. The youth would hear him come in early each morning, and then a few sounds of him moving about, then nothing.

Sunny made a fair bit of noise with his radio. The youth would hear him repeating words and phrases from it, as though he was practising his English. There was a disc jockey who called himself “Mannie the Man” and “Mad Mannie” and “Mannie Wannie” and “Mannie Mabuly Wuly” and other names. Mannie talked a whole crazy lingo of his own. “Mabuly Wuly's Truly Cool, Fool!” he might shout half-hysterically, and then you'd hear Sunny repeating it, but in a tone of formal politeness, the way you'd say, “Hello, I'm very pleased to meet you.”

Sometimes the youth felt like knocking on Sunny's door and explaining to him that Mannie was a nitwit and not worth taking notice of, and also that he'd prefer not to have the rubbish inflicted on him through the partition. And God knew what the night-worker bloke on the other side thought. He must be getting a gutful of Mannie too. Sometimes the youth fancied he could feel the irritation coming from that side. But he said nothing. He just wanted to mind his own business. He wanted to be snug and private with his White Book and his magazines and his copy of
Year of Decision
. He wanted to be left to think his own thoughts, a lot of which were now about Delia.

He'd been walking past, that first day, and had heard a tinkle of wind-chimes. He had looked up at the old house and had noted the elaborate verandah, the wrought-iron balcony, the stained-glass panels in the front door, the run-down relaxed look of the whole place. He had thought it would be nice to live there. Then he'd seen the small “Room to Let” notice. He'd wandered up and down the street for a long time, bracing himself for the ordeal of having to front up and act like a normal person who can smile and talk and be pleasant. Finally he went in at the iron gate and approached the front door. There was a discreet sign beside it which said:
DELIA'S KARMA CENTRE * BIRTH CHARTS * TAROT * CRYSTALS * AROMATHERAPY * ETC.
He rapped with a heavy doorknocker and waited for a longish while, but no-one responded. The sign worried him. He could feel his dredged-up determination draining away. He was heading back towards the gate when she came around the side of the house and called hello.

She looked like a beautiful witch. She had on a long flowing robe, and her hair was flowing too, long and dark and wavy. She was barefoot and had beads round her neck and bangles on her wrists. There were tiny bells attached to her ankle so that she made a tinkling sound when she walked. The youth was deeply struck from the first instant and would've fled except that her manner was so friendly.

“How
are
you?” she called as she came up to him, as if he was an old pal she was pleased to see.

“Not bad, thanks,” he replied, stopping at the gate. It would've been too rude to keep walking away.

She came and looked straight at him. She had hazel-green eyes, and her eyelids were painted a gold-speckled green, so that when she blinked you got two flicks of iridescent colour, as if two green butterflies had instantaneously fluttered and vanished. She had a long nose and pointy chin and very red lips and was perhaps in her thirties.

“How can I help you?” she asked.

He didn't trust his voice at that moment, so he gestured towards the Room to Let notice.

“Ah, lovely,” she said, as though the prospect of him coming to live there was just the nicest thing.

She showed him the garage room and within a minute they'd decided that he would take it. He asked if he could pay a month in advance and she agreed. Even though the room was cheap, four weeks would use up most of the money he'd brought back from Weegun. But at least he'd be sure of a whole month of having a roof over his head.

“You'll be one of my outsiders,” she said. “But only in the bodily sense, not the spiritual. In spirit we're all
insiders
here.”

They went into a front room of the house to organise the payment and the receipt. It was an office or consulting room where she received her clients. The room was full of crystals and charts and beaded curtains and feathery things dangling. And it had a smell that gave you a light, tingling sensation. It was bracing like the air of a high mountain meadow. But there was a heavy, musky,
witchy
feeling about it too, even if the witch was beautiful and had gold-flecked green butterflies for eyelids.

As Delia had leant over a little desk to write the receipt, she'd been outlined against the daylight at the window and her robe had become slightly see-through. The youth had been able to glimpse her breasts, or at least tell that they were bare under the material. After a moment he had averted his eyes, to be polite, and had looked instead at her feet. They were beautifully shaped, the toes long and slender, the nails painted a silvery colour. Then he looked at her hair lying across her back and shoulders, at the rich dark weight of it as it rippled to one side when she moved. The tinkle of the wind-chimes came from the verandah and suddenly the youth had a vivid sense of how much beauty and pleasure there must be in the world. It must be everywhere, just a little out of sight but almost close enough to touch. He had stumbled on a fraction of it, simply because those wind-chimes had prompted him to look up from the footpath. It was as chancy and flukey as that. You might walk the footpath till the end of time and never know what tingling beauty and bracingness was near you at a given moment.

That was part of the way that life toyed with you, he reflected. If the world was completely bleak and barren it would all be very simple. You would just grit your teeth and struggle to the end as best you could. Everyone would, and no-one would have any illusions. It would be like the life he imagined Eskimos have—knowing nothing but ghastly horizons of ice and snow. Never having had meadows and orchards and songbirds, they didn't miss them. But if you allowed them a glimpse of those things, they'd never again be content with everlasting ice. They would be going through the motions of their old true bitter lives, but the thought of the meadows and songbirds would be eating them away, ruining them as Eskimos without giving them the new things in any measure.

That was the insight Diestl had tried to drum into him. The youth understood the point about the strudel. If you think about the strudel—about sitting in some beautiful cafe in Vienna, with Strauss waltzes playing—you are finished as far as the long road of your destiny is concerned. That's what the world wants: for you to glimpse enough of the orchards, enough of the strudel, that you'll be snivelling for it ever afterwards. And yearners and snivellers are no threat. They get stepped on and can't do a damn thing about it. And Delia was a walking orchard, a living plate of strudel.

A phrase suddenly popped into the youth's mind.
The beautiful knife
. The most beautifully made and decorated knife is the one most likely to cut you, because you are drawn to touch and handle it. The most delicious berry is the one most likely to poison you. The most desirable witch is the one most likely to do you evil. He decided to call this the Principle of the Beautiful Knife. He felt he'd gained a new level of understanding. He reminded himself to tell Diestl about it.

By the time he and Delia had finished their transaction, he was in the Diestl mood. He stared blankly past her and said nothing. He felt the solid weight of the Schmeisser and imagined what a burst from it would do to that room and all those knick-knacks of wisdom and sensitivity. She had asked him about his star sign and was chatting pleasantly about whether Earth or Water was his best element. But then she sensed that he'd got very distant. Her flow of talk began to peter out. He left without saying anything more and went out to the garage room and lay on the bed and stared coldly at the ceiling for a long time.

 

SO HE
kept to himself in his room. He always peeked out into the yard before venturing across to the toilet, or if he was on his way out. Mostly he came and went via the backyard gate that connected to the lane. Delia was in the backyard a lot. She did washing for the tenants for a fixed amount per load, so she was often in the laundry at the back of the house, or hanging the washing out. When she did washing she put a big apron on over her billowing robe and tied her flowing hair back and wore rubber gloves of a bright yellow. The youth thought of this as the Working Witch outfit. She also tended a herb garden in a corner of the backyard. Other times she just hung about there with Sunny, the two of them side by side on a couple of deckchairs.

The youth would stand with his eye to the crack of the curtain and watch her as much as he could. Whenever he was watching her he would find himself feeling more alive and happy and somehow grateful to the whole scheme of things. But then he'd think of the Principle of the Beautiful Knife and begin to feel bitter and imagine unslinging the Schmeisser and injecting a burst of reality into it all. Despite his caution he occasionally came face to face with Delia. She would smile at him and say hello, or ask how he was getting on, and he would give a curt nod of the head or a half-wave of the hand to acknowledge her. It would have been rude not to acknowledge her. The youth wasn't one for outright rudeness. Neither was Diestl. No, you remain polite, as long as it doesn't endanger you, and as long as you also make it clear that you don't care. In fact you make it clear that the extent of your not caring would stun people if you chose to reveal it fully. You are walking a different road and have nothing in your heart but the endless ruin of the world.

One day, when he was watching Delia chat with someone in the backyard, his hand accidentally brushed the curtain. He saw her glance across, her eye caught by the movement. She knew that he was there watching. He felt he could never face her again. She now knew that his pretending not to care was just a pathetic act, and that he actually cared so much that he skulked at his window with his eyes bulging for the least glimpse of her. But then he got enraged. Who was
she
to despise
him
? He paid good money for his room and he had a right to glance out of his window once in a while if he wanted to. He had a right to the view from his window without
her
being in his line of sight every two minutes, just as he had a right not to be tormented by Mabuly Wuly nonsense. He felt like storming and shouting that he'd leave, that if he'd known he was going to be stopped from looking out his own window he would never have come there.

But he did nothing except keep more out of sight. He was going to have to leave anyway, when his month was up. Then he'd be homeless on the street again, and there'd be no Delia to look at.

He began leaving his room first thing in the morning and not returning till after dark. He spent his time wandering the city and suburbs, or at the State Library, or in the Botanical Gardens. He kept away from the State Museum, because of the pushbike thing, but he discovered the Technological Museum in another part of town.

The Technological Museum had wonderful things in it. Above all there were the Viking swords. There were half-a-dozen of these in a glass case, blades corroded, and the hand-grips rotted away, but otherwise they were the same as when the long-dead people had carried them. Beside each sword was a printed card giving some facts about it, like the period it was from, where it had been made, where it was found. They were all earlier than 1066 and the youth stared at them in wonderment that they had existed when King Harold was alive.