Authors: Celeste Walters

The Glass Mountain (21 page)

BOOK: The Glass Mountain

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The night is wide and still.

At the window Ossie stands and stares through horizontal bars at a milky scrubland. The moonlight streams into his cell, casting a system of sliprails across the floor. It's a night for poets, for painters, for highwaymen galloping across lonely moors on fiery steeds.

It's magic, the white light of a winter moon, the gold light of a glass mountain, the memory of which will never leave him.

He thinks of it now. Of that moment when the peak flooded a certain place at a certain time with its golden beam. When people, in huge numbers, seemingly from out of nowhere were seen to move across the sand to the spot where he is standing, to where they perceive the light has fallen. He can still see the old man, his arms threshing the air, being pushed forward in a wheelchair; the limp childlike body of a grown woman being born on the shoulders of the hunchbacked frame.

So many anxious eyes. Except he sees something else. Just a flash of it, but it's there. It's a picture, like he saw the McCubbin in the gallery. Except this time he's in it. And he knows he's in it because he can smell and taste what's on the canvas. It's on his tongue, it's moving into his mouth and through his gut.

The picture is of a market. And the place is some where he's never seen before as the smells and tastes are different to any he's ever known. The clothes that people wear are different too. They're eastern. As the wares are eastern. He has a pack upon his back and before him are cheeses of enormous size, exotic fruits, spices that swell from gourds, herbs wound in gauze, oils and perfumes in earthenware pots. And above him hang meats around which a yellow dog leaps gymnastically â¦ As the vision fades the colours and shapes condense, meld into a single element of blue â everything is in harmony. And beneath his feet the stones are warm â¦

Ossie looks around, he studies the sea, the sand, the encroaching throng â¦

Away from the crowd, and oblivious to what's going on, sits a child. He picks up a shell, the living space of some miniscule sea creature. He studies it, turns it over, traces the design with his finger, puts it to his nose, his ear. Hears the sea. Observes the miracle â¦ As Essie observed it in the white painted ghost gum, in her little pink pebble â¦

Ossie runs his fingers up and down the bars. They're cold to the touch.

And what will they make of this chapter in the story? For it will be told. And so the legend grows.

Way, way off he can see the tiny twinkle of a light. Maybe its a car bumping over some farm road or other â¦ The light stutters once, twice, and goes out.

Now his thoughts turn to the Big Man, like the light, snuffed out in one mad moment of â what? anger, pain, guilt, self-hate â all four? Gone over the edge as he, Ossie, had. Except there was no good gum holding firm its trunk to stop the dark from closing up for him â¦

Ossie sees himself; he's eleven and he's standing in the chaos of stagnant unimportant scraps of a life that lie strewn on the floor of the caravan. On an upturned box that poses as a table, there's a book. It's full of poems. He flips it open and a piece of paper falls out. It's a little story that's set in the House of Judgment. An' in it God goes up to this man and says like he's been bad so He's going to send him to hell. But the man says that He can't send him there because that's where he's always lived. So God says He'll send him to heaven. But the man replies that He can't send him there because he's never been able to imagine it. An' in the House of Judgement there's silence â¦

An' the Pres reads it too, 'cos he's there with me. An' he puts his arm around my shoulders an' we just stand there. Like forever.

Everybody loved the Big Man. But he didn't love himself. So he didn't know it.

Sad thing is, he didn't hit a tree and steal a purse and find an Essie and have his whole life change in the blink of an eye â¦ Making all those homilies, those never-ending quotes, come true.

Ossie smiles, he can hear him now an' he's saying, “It's life that's the miracle, Kid â the whole bloody beautiful catastrophe.” And then Essie pipes up with, “There's a divinity that shapes our ends / Rough-hew them how we will.” An' the Big Man's knocked off his sunbeam because at last he's found a fellow ventilator of homilies an' proverbs an' all. An' amongst the gathering there's not likely to be too many unless you work your way back to where those riding sixteenth century sunbeams are lined up.

The smile widens. Between the two of them there's a very excellent bunch of things he's learnt that he can pass onto her. To his little goddaughter.

Now the smile has shaped dimples.

He'll buy her books. Her very first. Her second an' third. He'll tell her about rich an' wonderful words â¦

An' they'll find a personal spot, just the two of them where you can hear a trout stream's song, where you can watch a blue-green kingfisher sharpen its bill an' a dragon-fly light on a reed. An' he'll read to her, an' they'll read to each other an' they'll share their thoughts about things â¦

Suddenly a hand passes over the moon. Ossie remains there for a moment as darkness wraps up no-man's-land, then he switches on the light, curls onto his bed, picks up his book. And continues to read â¦

First published 2003 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

www.uqp.com.au

Â© Celeste Walters

This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any foram or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

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