Heat and Light (4 page)

While the tart was baking, June from down the road came to the door. Pete had a fever, June said. The school had rung, and they wouldn’t keep him there. With Griffin at work, Marie knew she had to walk the fifteen-odd minutes to get Pete. The tart was intended to stay in the oven for twenty-five minutes.

Marie ran through the heat, sweat seeping into her eyes. Her feet ached in her poorly worn shoes. She thought about Pete, always getting sick. Griffin said he spent too much time indoors, doing women’s work. When she arrived, Pete was standing outside the school office, holding his forehead. She kissed him and held him to her.

‘I’m so sorry, my son,’ she said. ‘We’re going to have to rush home.’

When they were children, she and Pearl walked everywhere, barefoot. They followed her father through the country. He showed them the dirt patterns. Pearl, her only whole blood sibling, didn’t look like her; she was darker, stronger-looking. They didn’t look alike even as children. Pearl had eyes that had been watching for a lot longer than when she was born.

Marie and Pete made it to the house, bringing the heat in. She carried Pete up the stairs and he was asleep before he was in bed. She pulled the blanket halfway up his sweating, small body.

She opened the oven and there the finger lime tart was, just ready, edges brown but not burnt. Her hand tingled from the heat as she pulled it out, but no worry – this speciality was for her sister and she had prepared it.

She walked up to the bathroom, pushing open the door. The curtains had been pulled half over the window. The first thing she saw was Pearl’s stomach, floating above the water’s surface. Pearl’s eyes were shut. There was an arm of a different skin tone around her chest, below her large, floating breasts. Two people were in the bathtub. The two people, her sister and her husband, were in a terrible tangle or a struggle or some kind. Griffin was behind Pearl, half of his face showing behind her hair, his shoulders against the wall. He was moving, and the colourless water was running around them as if it couldn’t keep up. They opened up their eyes and saw her, but their bodies stayed where they were.

Marie went downstairs and pulled out the knife to cut a slice of the pie, which was cooling on a rack next to the oven. She delicately transferred the piece onto a gold-rimmed plate and added a coin-sized dollop of fresh cream beside it. She waited. Griffin appeared, and said he was going back to work, his hair half-wet. The car roared out onto the street.

In a few minutes, Pearl came down the stairs in her white dress. Marie put the plate in front of her. Pearl sat on the same chair she had sat on when she first came to the house, the chair that had become hers during her stay, a chair that had originally belonged to their mother. The room was full of family items. In a bowl next to Pearl were their father’s clapsticks, which he had made himself using unblemished, light wood. Pearl used her hands to bring the pie to her mouth, nodding in approval at the taste. There were no crumbs left when she handed Marie back the plate.

After she finished, Pearl slid herself out the window to go for an afternoon smoke. Marie took the plate to the sink and put the rest of the pie in the fridge, with the knife resting on top. She reached over the bench to shut the kitchen window. The heat was immediately trapped. She got a handful of face washers out of the linen cupboard and ran them under the tap. Irma, who had been playing in the yard, came inside, her face flushed. She presented in front of her mother, opening her palms to a lady beetle, which flew up, grazing the girl’s nose. The beetle went towards the closed window. Marie stuck a washer on Irma’s neck. They heard a tapping, a prodding.

‘Don’t open the window, dear,’ she said.

Irma nodded. They both looked outside at the same time. Pearl was staring straight at them with a sickening glare. One hand on her back and one on her stomach, she was huge and hurting. Her dress flipped up in the wind and her stomach demanded viewing. Marie quickly moved away from the kitchen. She walked upstairs to Pete’s room. He was sleeping, his hands under his cheek. She got in beside him and pushed the cold washer on to the dent of his back. It was like throwing an ice cube into a fire. She hugged him to her, the clammy warmth of his arms and the drowsy muffle of the bed. She wasn’t sure if she was sleeping.

She was rattled by Irma’s voice at the door. ‘Mum, you gotta come. Aunty is havin’ a baby out the front.’

*

Pearl was in the currents of contractions outside the house. She was kneeling directly in line with the front door, facing the street. Marie and Irma got her down on the ground, one hand on either of her shoulders. Her breath was citrus and smoke. The water on the ground sizzled from the sun. Pearl’s eyes widened and Marie held on to her. No cars went by and no one saw them, but at the same time the valley saw them. The open sky fingering their skin.

This was where the sisters had been born, in the shadows of the ironbarks, the spot where their women had given birth for a continuum of years. Pearl made little sound as she pushed. She didn’t cry out. Sweat broke across her back. She leant forward, her head on her arms, her legs swaying from side to side, her toes clenched together. Above, the leaves stirred with wind. She moved back to her hands and knees, head up. A fierce whisper escaped her lips but no words were understood.

For Marie, it was quick and there was nothing to be done. A few minutes and a few tries and it was Irma that had her hands where they needed to be. She took the baby from Irma’s arms, the wet blood shared across their arms. He made a sound that imprinted on her.

A while later, they sat in the kitchen on the chairs, eating the remaining pie out of the dish. Pearl was newly energised and talkative. Irma was proud. Marie tried to feel relief. The baby was solid and soft. She had weighed him on the kitchen scales, 4.6 kilograms. She sat with the baby wrapped in a white blanket, his eyes opened when she looked at him. He had a thick grey casing of hair on his head.

Pearl moved through the kitchen and opened the window near the sink, looking out into the bush. Her hair moved a bit as she turned.

She spoke. ‘You said you would look after him.’

Marie slowly shook her head. ‘He is your child.’

‘You can understand why I can’t take it with me. It would be good here. A brother for Irma and Peter. A gift. A birthday present.’

Marie shut her eyes for a moment.

‘Of course,’ her sister said, smiling. ‘I wouldn’t forget your birthday.’ She leant forward and gave her a kiss on her cheek.

Marie looked down at the baby in her arms. She didn’t move as Pearl bent her knees and pushed her body through the sun-lined window. She could hear her sister’s feet touch the ground and her firm, wet steps as she went back the way she came.

‘A decent size, this little bloke,’ Griffin said when he got home. ‘Well done.’

They named the baby Charles, after Griffin’s father, and Jack, after her father. He was Charles Jack Kresinger, for all her children kept their grandfather’s name. He wasn’t painted up proper way, and there was no ceremony, the clapsticks had disappeared from the house, but Marie knew he’d grow up Kresinger; she knew how to do it right.

Crash

Two cars raced up the mountain in the night. A white Subaru and a grey four wheel-drive. There was just the one road, a steep, winding one, with none of the safety rails or signs you see implemented now.

The first car, the white one, was driven by Lena. Lena, Mrs Kresinger, was thinking of the last thing her husband said to her. He’d come home with the eggs she needed for the pastry, none of them broken, he’d put a hand on her waist and said, ‘Lena, I’m going to take you for a drive soon. Just the two of us.’

She had smiled in surprise, that small moment spurring something. She had loved him for ten years and he still did that to her.

Janet Jensen had loved him for the same amount of time. She’d never admit to him she noticed him first. Dark seductive eyelashes, long hair, and that body. She watched him from her office on George Street; bare-chested, he led protests against anti-march laws, holding signs and swearing through a microphone. At night, when she finished late she saw him, now with a shirt on, stumbling out of bars, always followed by a blonde white girl, both off their faces. She’d seen him swagger around the city and thought, that’s the kind of man I want, but I know that’s all wrong.

She worked as a junior clerk at the law firm. She’d been highly ambitious from a young age, and raised in a well-off family, which gave her the opportunity to study with some of the groundbreakers of the time at the University of Queensland, and it wasn’t too long before she was a qualified lawyer.

Charlie and two of his mates, Doug Hall and Ronnie Blake, were fighting charges of assault on police in a demonstration. She noticed the surprise in his face when she was introduced as their lawyer. His first words to her were a challenge: ‘What does a pretty rich white girl like you know about politics?’

But she ended up being his match. Quiet, with a biting intelligence, she spoke slowly and with grace. He learnt to listen. She was never going to say anything that would land her in trouble, but he got her talking dirty.

She was behind the wheel of the second car, the
four wheel-drive
. Her husband, Gary, said women were ill-suited to drive a car like that. Janet had found some recklessness in her forties.

Both women had heard Charlie Kresinger’s bike had tumbled off the top. Not long after a passer-by had called Emergency, the news had travelled through the town. Call it Goorie grapevine or women’s intuition, but they both knew fast.

Janet Jensen hadn’t been in town long. Her husband had bought a holiday home, on the bay, with a view of the ocean. They’d had the place for over a year but this was the first time Gary could get away. The kids were on school holidays. Janet was catching up on her reading, and catching up on Charlie, finding out all about him through the chatty locals.

Janet hadn’t seen Charlie for years, but just the day before, they’d run into each other in the organics store. He had cut off his dreads. He still looked thirty, fit – the bronzed young warrior she remembered. While they stood together in the aisle, she recalled how she would always push his dreads to the side, an unconscious habit when they were talking. She put her hand up, but now she had to touch his cheek. Firm, large. A man’s cheek.

He didn’t flinch. He looked at her with his dark eyes; he reminded her of an American Indian. When she looked at him she remembered him, remembered his dreads flicking in her face as they kissed on the waterfront, a decade ago. The dreads had a stretch of pure silver in them, like the edge of a wave. He kept them in a ponytail only when he surfed or rode, and wore them loose when he walked around town, relaxed and salt-silly from a duck-in, seawater on his lips.

Charlie touched his face where Janet had touched him. She noticed a dark mole on the opposite cheek that she was sure had never been there before. She was fascinated by his difference.

‘Married?’ he asked her.

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Gary’s a chef.’

‘Gary or Gravy?’ he answered, but dully, without a smile, as if the effort to joke was too predictable and no longer fun.

They reached the cash register.

‘After you,’ he said, with an elaborate gesture.

She paid for her groceries. He put the bananas and peanut paste down, and reached for his wallet. She had to speak.

‘Can we—’

‘Go for coffee sometime?’ He winked. ‘Sure.’

Coffee would lead to something, she knew. Open up the precious space between them once more. Now, as she drove, she thought repeatedly – please let it not be the last time I see him, the last thing I say to him.

He had driven up the mountain, maybe drunk – irresponsible, even for Charlie. With that, you couldn’t help but start to think about things. Was he suicidal? Janet wondered. What could cause him to be suicidal? Seeing her yesterday? That he loved her but couldn’t be with her?

When Janet turned the bend she saw the white car ahead. They were both speeding. Janet wanted to overtake, but the other car gave her no room, not that there was much on this stretch of road. Then she recognised the driver. They both recognised each other, Janet by the other woman’s long luscious hair in plaits, Lena via the rear-view mirror, the nose. With a groan, Janet put her foot on the pedal and sped up; she went off the road and up the terrain, following a dirt trail used as maintenance.

Lena shook her head at the sight of the other vehicle climbing, disappearing up the bare incline. She kept a steady speed, going carefully around the corners. What use would she be to Charlie not alive? She needed to reach him in one piece.

Charlie had taught Lena to drive when their daughter was four. She was a natural, he said. A much better driver than he was. There is something about women who learn to drive after they’ve become mothers. If she had learnt before, she would be as wild and passionate as she was with anything else. But she was subdued on the road; she took care of herself and others.

She would never tell Charlie to give up the motorcycle. It was him as much as his surfboard and his shark-tooth necklace and earring. Not a fake, he had caught the bastard himself, he said. Different from his brother and sister, and despite being a freshwater man by blood, Charlie felt the lure of the ocean. He used to tear down the coast on his bike at any opportunity, ride back and forth from the city – he had cultural political obligations there – looked up to as a young leader of his mob. But during his expulsion, he decided to live by the beach permanently in a sharehouse in Byron Bay. He loved Byron and the southern beaches. It became a second home to him. He fit in with the surfing and the hippie and artistic scene, the raw food movement. Back then he had dreads that went halfway down his back.

At that time Lena lived in the same sharehouse, mostly rented by uni dropouts who weren’t there long enough to leave an imprint. After finding each other, Charlie and Lena stayed there well past the usual time. There were nine of them living in the cramped house; he slept on the balcony in a hammock, she in the second room off the hallway. They’d been living under the same roof for a few weeks, but he was rarely home, and they hadn’t had a proper conversation.

It had been two months since she’d left her home in Crete. She’d been backpacking around Australia and was staying in Byron for a while. She danced at the night markets by the beach to make some money. One afternoon he was buttering a slice of toast and she was making coffee at the same time and they both offered each other some. He took an interest, asked what she did. She asked him to come along that night, and that’s when he first really saw her.

When he arrived, his eyes were embraced by a wall of colour – orange, yellow, blue and the sexual beat of a drum. He felt an unexplained nervousness for the first time in his life. She was bellydancing in mango scent, candle hue and mosquitoes. As fast as she was moving, he was transfixed by the sweat rolling down her stomach. Lena liked the hot climate, like him, and after they made love, they would sleep in the hammock on the deck, wake up with mosquito bites.

They still made love like teenagers, with the audacity to try something new.

Sweat was forming on the top of Janet’s lip. The car was rolling forward of its own accord, she wasn’t in control. She could almost see the peak of the mountain.

They’d met again in Brisbane, in a professional context, though at a vulnerable time in each of their lives. Charlie and Lena’s child had just started school. Janet had never gotten over him, and it must have been obvious in the way she looked at him in their meetings at a West End cafe. They worked late, found ways to linger. They grew closer than they had before without being physical. One night he showed up at her door, rain trickling in behind him and she knew, as he knew, what could happen. She didn’t want it to be this way.

She reasoned with him. ‘You have a beautiful wife, a beautiful child. What are you doing here?’

Trying to get closer, he said, ‘Things won’t feel resolved for me unless you kiss me. Kiss me and that will be enough.’ But as soon as he said it, they both know that it was not true. That the kiss would only open up the mass of feelings and turn those feelings into actions.

‘I can’t,’ she said.

His eyes locked into hers, he showed her his desperation. He took a step up, his chest forward, a hand in his dreads, keeping them from his face. The rain had soaked his sleeves. The necklace moved against his neck, closer to her. And then her words must have sunken in, he remembered himself – let his hair go, and she saw the back of him as quickly as he had come at her. He strode away with a flat stride, detached from the pace of the increasing rain. The swagger had gone.

She wondered what would have happened if she had let him in, if they had started the affair. Just one touch, his hand in hers, a thumb to her lips and she would have lost her objections. She didn’t want to be the other woman, but she was never anything else.

She knew the woman Charlie had married was an exotic dancer with browned skin, flowing hair. Why would Charlie bother with a plain Jane like her, when he could go to the Greek islands every day of the week? Lena enjoyed life. From Charlie she knew Lena found vitality in music, was creative, pursued things to abandon, could be like a child. Janet could never do that. She was too serious, too aware, especially of herself.

Still, she remembered the intelligent conversations about art, politics and philosophy they’d had in the brief times they were together.

‘Whatcha reading?’ he would say as he came up to her in the cafe, planting a kiss on her cheek, close to the lips.

He was shaped by his parents. He said about his father: ‘He was from a rich family. But they gave him away when he married his own kind. They raised him white and the moment he remembered he was black, the moment he tried being himself they left him.’ About his mother: ‘The strongest woman I’ve ever met. She would do anything for us.’

Charlie was the youngest, and both women would agree about one thing – he had been spoilt rotten by his mother and his sister, Irma. Janet teased he hadn’t learnt to wash himself, except in the sea.

When he talked about being a spokesperson for his mob he often said, ‘My ancestors died for me to have this right.’

Janet felt a warmth spread across her hands just from listening to him talk. He was so passionate about his family history, and he had great, wild ideas. He’d look at her like they were going to change the world together.

Gary, on the other hand, was kind, but not wanting. He was, like her, driven by his job, suppressing the need for anything else, things they’d felt when they were younger but no longer believed in.

As Janet drove onward, the road treacherously steep, she had no knowledge of what was ahead of her. She felt a tightness in her chest; she must get to him, clamp her lips down on his. If he died she would be alone.

She pushed down the accelerator and, coming unexpectedly upon the road again, the vehicle lifted off the ground, airborne for a moment, before pummelling back towards the ground and landing on the white car. The back tyres of the four wheel-drive smacked onto the bonnet. The piled cars wobbled. The white car swerved and braked underneath.

Inside, Lena, swearing and screaming in Greek, felt glass fly in her face. Instead of bringing the car to a complete stop then, somehow she accelerated and rushed them forward, closer
to the edge, so the other vehicle was rammed at the clifftop. Lena saw the four wheel-drive tilt forward. Down below she saw the lights of the town, and the lit-up bay. Perfect, dark. Lena watched it happen from the outside. She found herself in another scene, back then. Watching on while Charlie loved Janet. The first time she saw Janet she was on the television. Charlie had known to switch it on. There she was, immediate in her beauty and intelligence. When Lena had seen her after that she was always impeccably dressed, a fancy, sophisticated woman who used big words in normal conversation. She couldn’t compete with that. And now this woman, not just content with fucking her husband, was here, claiming him again.

Lena felt the gravity in her own car. ‘Oh, shit,’ she said. She reversed, and the tyres circled the dirt, the engine heaved, then she felt the car roll slowly backwards.

When the car was clear off the cliff’s line, Lena tumbled out, falling into the overgrowth. As soon as she got to her feet, she started running. It was only a moment before she heard Janet reach the ground and chase her down the road. Janet reached the shorter woman, grabbed her hands, pulled her around and swung at her. She missed Lena’s face and cried out. She put her hands down. They were bleeding.

Lena left her, and continued jogging further up the mountain road. She called her husband’s name into the trees. She picked out a shard of glass from her neck.

The red and blue sirens flashed up ahead. There was an exclusion zone around a pair of trees. A motorbike was wedged between them.

The paramedics, standing in a pool of light on the road, stared at the two women approaching. One of the paramedics on duty that night, a Murri one, would say he had never been more frightened at the sight of them appearing like spirits.