North of Nowhere, South of Loss (12 page)

He opens his eyes very wide, the pupils dilated. The moon, bright orange, sits behind his head like a plate. Maggie sees herself, twice over, in his eyes.

“I turned around,” he says, whispering now, “and there were hundreds and hundreds of them, thousands maybe, just standing there with their spears in their hands, watching me. They didn't make a sound. They were naked except for those little things they wear, and white bodypaint.”

He clutches at his heart, a sharp pain grabbing him again. “It spooked me,” he whispers. “The way they just stood there watching. They never made a sound, but I knew what they were waiting for.”

He looks at Maggie intently. “They are
with
us,” he said. “I never realised before, but they're with us.”

Maggie swallows.

“I climbed down off the steamroller,” he says. “And I walked away. I never went back.”

“Dad,” Maggie says gently. “Let's go back to the house.”

But he doesn't want to. He stands there staring into the wetlands. “Alpha and Omega,” he murmurs. He seems to be sifting through clutter in his mind. “The first and the last,” he says. “The First Ones.
The last shall be first.”

Maggie tugs at his hand. “Dad,” she says.

“Seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses”
he says, pulling at a creeper from the scrub of his Gospel Hall decade. He thinks he's got hold of something. “And in those days, the last shall be the First Ones, and they shall be with us in the land.”

“Dad, you're mixing things up.”

“Nothing fits,” he says, turning to offer his puzzled benediction. “That's the problem, Maggie. Nothing fits. But I know what's real and what's not, and they are with us.”

CAPE TRIBULATION

This is how it is, Brian sees, nip and tuck, he has to be quick, and the sheets are no protection whatsoever. When the bats swoop they give off a high-pitched sound like email, or perhaps he imagines that, but he does not imagine the velvet pelting, there must be dozens of them,
dozens,
he has to crouch into himself and roll on the bed, this way, that way, arms over his head. “It's your hair that you have to watch out for,” Philippa told him once, over a restaurant table somewhere. She was gesturing violently with her hands. She always did that, oblivious, knocking wine glasses over, knives off the table.

“For God's sake, Philippa,” he'd said.

“Did I do that?” She'd stared at her hands, puzzled.

“Don't,” he said, agitated.

“Don't what?”

“Drift off like that. For God's sake, keep hold of the reins.”

He had seen a painting somewhere, he could not remember where, an Arthur Boyd, he thought. There was a woman in a horse-and-carriage rising out of nowhere, out of ocean, out of water and fog and cloud. It was Philippa to a T, dreamy, parasol-twirling, somewhere else. “It's a kind of Australian
Birth of Venus”'
he said. “It's you, arriving with your usual splash –”. She, after all, was the one who rattled blithely on, inattentive but unsinkable, tooling through fog and floodway, through interruptions, smashed glasses, absences, shipwreck, nightmare, whatever, pulled by a galloping horse who knew the way home; which was why he, Brian, could hive off on mysterious routes, sniffing and testing, getting lost, knowing she'd keep an eye out for him, that she'd reach for him and haul him in, or turn back and come looking if need be. “Hurtling along the fingertip of Queensland and planting your lace umbrella like a flag.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A painting. I'm going under, you go barrelling over the skin of the water in a horse-and-buggy and rescue me.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about.” She'd folded her hands and rested them on the edge of the table, studying him, blinking. “You're nuts.”

“Probably,” he'd said.

“Where was I?” she'd asked vaguely.

“Bats. You were rattling on about bats.”

“Ah yes, bats,” and her hands had flown up and hovered and dipped. “It's your hair,” she'd insisted. “The little hooks on their wings, they catch in your hair, and then they panic, see, they whip it into snarled coir. In three ticks, your hair's a mesh of old mattress fibre, it's excruciating.”

“Rubbish,” he'd said, relieved. “What bullshit. That's a children's myth, Philippa, like frogs causing warts. It's amazing, the stuff you'll believe. Bats don't touch
anything,
they're masters of the art of evasion, believe me, they have the most highly developed radar –”

“It is not a myth,” she'd said. “How would you know, Brian? You're a dot-matrix person. Japan or here in Melbourne, what's the difference? You have a
virtual
life, and what would you know” – as her fork curved into the question mark; her fork, like her hands and her argument, in shimmering flight – “what does anyone know about errors that might have been breeding themselves for decades?” She rummaged under the tablecloth. “I'll bet there's misinformation that travels like a virus from one data bank to the next. I can't find my … oh there it is. Whereas me,” she said, “I live by touch and sight and … Anyway, I was with this group once – maybe I've told you this? – in South India.”

“Yes,” he said. “The temple tower, the dark spiral stairs. You've told me.”

“– and this cloud of bats came for us,” she said. “We dislodged them or something, this little black cloud, it was horrible. There was a woman in a sari with hair down to her bum and the bats settled on it like rabid moths. She screamed and screamed and they had to hold her down and practically shave her head. I still have nightmares.”

“I'll bet,” Brian said. “I believe you. But you make them up afterwards.”

“Right. I dream them up. Exactly.”

“Yes, you do, you dream them up, you invent –”

“Dreams are dreamed up,” she said. “That's the way they happen, Brian.”

“And your stories get more detailed with each retelling, are you aware of that? They thicken out.”

“One of the German tourists had a Swiss army knife,” she said, “and someone else, someone from Bangalore I think, had a dagger, but it must have been blunt, because they had to hack, the two men I mean, they hacked her hair –”

“You come up with more amazing details each time,” he said. “You embroider everything, Philippa.”

“The dagger had a beautiful handle. Quite extraordinary, I remember.” She stroked the curves of the fork she had retrieved and held it against her cheek. “Silver and gold filigree, it was, like fig roots scabbling a tree –”

“Scabbling?”

“Yes. Rainforest style. I asked if I could hold it, but the man from Bangalore wouldn't let me. And I remember there was another man who wept, the woman's husband, I think. It's a disgrace, you know, in India, to have your hair cut off'.”

“You're hopeless,” Brian said. “You've got Galloping Invention, it's a kind of disease, and you can't even hold your own reins.”

“And you,” she countered, witheringly. “Packing the jack-in-a-box world into numbers. Better keep the lid on tight, Brian.” And now this come-uppance: he is having her nightmares. Her bats are arriving by email; also memos from his funding committees, the university administration, the Physics Department, his research partners, his labs in Melbourne and Japan, his computer technicians, his alarmed colleagues, his frustrated students, his frightened and angry ex-wife. He answers none of them, he ducks and brushes them away with his arms. He pulls the sheet over his head, then drags it with him and tents it over his desk.

Philippa,
he emails,
there's no such word as scabbling. Bats never hit anything. Your memory is cockeyed, your knowledge of science is at the level of old wives' tales. Love, Brian.

He wants to establish one fixed compass point. He would wait for her to come galloping in for the gauntlet if he could wait.

Philippa,
he emails one hour later.
Help! I can't keep the lid on any more. Brian.

He watches for the flicker of her arrival on his screen, and yes he thinks he's receiving, yes, she is splashing out of digital fog, rising from the cyberflecked sea. She sits high in the trap, waving. He can see foam on the horse's flank, then a whitish blur,
It's a trap
, she winks,
system error
, damn damn damn, they are blinked out, gone, trailing streamers of ghostwords. He has to fish for them.

Brian, where are you? I've been trying to reach you for two years. I heard you were terribly ill, and then you just disappeared. For God's sake, where have you been? Love, Philippa.

I don't know,
he tries to answer.
I'm lost.
But now the bats intervene and he cannot even find his keyboard in the dark.

He could be in Japan. By the roar, he thinks it must be Japan. Outside his fifth-storey window, the concrete pretzel of freeway looms like a reef, so yes, it's definitely Osaka, and the noise would drive him crazy within hours had he not invented a device to outwit it. Beneath his bunk (which must be raised and hooked against the wall when he wishes to use his desk), he nestles a hair-dryer in the crook of a ceramic bowl. All day while he works, and all night while he tries to sleep, to make white noise he leaves the hair-dryer on, full blast. The ceramic bowl safely disperses the heat, he is proud of that touch. He burns out one appliance per month but considers the solace cheap. His room, in the building for visiting professors, is so small that he fears the walls will implode if he sucks in too deep a breath.

He twists and holds the pillow over his head. Who would have thought that bats could come right off the freeway stack, straight out of the hot urban night? The hooks on their wings are tiny, as delicate and vicious as the fishhooks he and Richard used in coral-reef pools when the tide was out. They would never let Philippa hold the lines. “See if I care,” she'd say bitterly. They were all kids then, all from the same neighbourhood, the same school. They all still lived on the sunshine coast of never-never land, in Queensland, and he wonders why it was they all left. Perhaps that was the original mistake, he thinks, though there was a time when they couldn't wait to get away. Before that time, back in the childhood zone, there were no clouds in the sky, no shadows, and no one was lost. Zebra-striped minnows, they sometimes caught; golden hammerfish; cobalt-coloured zitherfish; fish smaller than a finger but shockingly bright as they zipped between the antlers of the coral. There were no obstacles, no collisions. They knew their way then, they all swam as safely as reef trout.

“Anyway,” Philippa said, “they're horrid, those hooks. The fish are too pretty, and it's cruel.”

“We're going to swim to the Outer Reef now,” he said, “me and Richard. You can't come, because you swim like a girl and you'd drown.”

“I don't want to,” she claimed, furious, dabbing at trickles of blood on her legs. “It's dangerous. There's coral underneath you, that you can't see, and if you don't watch out, you'll get scraped.”

“Only girls get scraped,” he said.

“Don't be stupid,” she said. “Everyone gets scraped. What about Captain Cook? He got scraped.”

“Because he didn't have charts,” Brian said. “That's why. But we know where we're going, so we won't.”

“Bet you don't know the date Cook got scraped.”

“Bet you don't either.”

“Bet I do,” she said. “Eleventh of June, 1770.”

“Smarty pants,” Richard accused.

“Show-off,” Brian said. “Anyway,” he added loftily, “it was the other end of the reef, up near the equator, where he got wrecked.”

“Not wrecked,” she claimed. “Keelhauled.”

Brian laughed. “
Sailors
got keelhauled, dummy, not ships.”

“Keelhauled by the reef,” she insisted. “Then they got into the Endeavour River and fixed the ship with oakum and … and –”

“Show-off !”

“– and sheep's dung,” she spluttered defiantly, fighting the dunking. “I hate you, Brian.”

Naturally Brian has read Cook's journals since then. He has read them a number of times, waiting for the right moment, the right year, the right trivia quiz, to trump Philippa. They're still at it, forty years later. But also: the matter of sailing into unmapped waters, which has turned out to be the business of Brian's own life, has him hooked. He licks his lips. He has tasted that particular excitement, the edging into blank space, and his tongue is equally familiar with the salt tang of risk. He has known deceptive nights like that of June 11, 1770. They line themselves up like rude marker buoys, such nights,
in clear moonlight and with a fine breeze,
as Cook plaintively wrote, Cape Tribulation on the port side licked with gold, the coral cays gleaming low to the east. The
Endeavour
floats as carefree as a painted ship upon a painted sea and naturally Brian will stay on the bridge, excited, peering into the dark where no one has ever sailed before, and there is no need for him to sleep or eat or pay any attention whatsoever to obsession or exhaustion or the expostulations of the crew or of neglected students, for the goal of all his exploration is in sight and he can taste it, he can sense the rigging of his calculations falling into perfect – and then the sails hesitate. He feels the change in the slap of ocean, wave patterns gone manic. He hears the sickening crunch of hull against reef.

I have called the point Cape Tribulation,
Cook wrote in his journal,
for here began all our troubles.

Philippa,
Brian emails.
I've been keelhauled. I'm all at sea. I'm stranded somewhere off Cape Tribulation, and I'm not sure if I can patch the vessel up. Please write. Any old clap-trap and galloping horse-thoughts will do. Brian.

He puts his message in a bottle and floats it in the flickergreen cyberslick sea. The fingers of coral reach for it. They make a bony internet that is dangerously below the line of sight.

I did not think it safe to run in among the shoals,
Brian reads in Cook's Coral Sea log,
until I had well viewed them at low water from the masthead, that I might be better able to judge which way to steer, for… all passages appeared to be equally difficult and dangerous.

Brian gropes among the antlered reefs for his keyboard. Glaucous light, like the sun seen from under water, or like the glow from a monitor or from fluorescent tubes in some institutional building, falls on his gashed hands. The blood on his sheets frightens him.

Philippa,
he emails, panicked.
I can't see any way out.

“Row, row, row” a man says. He has the build of a football player but is strangely dressed in white canvas. “It's gonna go easier for you, mate, if you give it some slack.”

“Are you sailors?” Brian splutters, going under.

“That's a good one,” the man laughs. “Not sailors, mate. Orderlies. One, two, and we'll have you unwrapped.”

“Cardinal,” Brian corrects. “Those are
cardinal
numbers, not ordinal.”

“Pin 'is arms, Joe, till we're sure. Bugger's scraped me skin off more than once. Not to mention what he's done to himself.”

“Yeah. Weird, innit? Like birds or bats have been at 'im. Wonder why the high and mighty go nuts when they go nuts. Hey, that's funny. Get it? They go nuts when they go nuts. But more nutso than your ordinary nut case, I mean. You noticed that, Mac?”