The Idea of Perfection (42 page)

Getting on the blower
to Head Office had to be done, but he dreaded the way it was not going to solve anything.

It was hopeless trying to get back to sleep. He got up and went over to the window. It was still early. He could hear the rooster, already going strong:
Cock-a-doo! Cock-a-doo!
He supposed it would be possible to get used to it eventually, and stop waiting for it to go
doodle-do.

A kookaburra was cackling just outside the window. There was a fresh eucalyptus dawn coolness in the air, and the sky was pale and benign now, although it would be harsh with heat later in the day.

The kookaburra was perched on the top of the facade of the shop next door, and when he leaned out it caught his eye and stopped laughing. They stared at each other across the space of air, man and bird.

Karakarook looked picturesque under the early light. Long soft shadows lay mauve everywhere and where the sunlight fell it was syrupy: thick and golden. The sky was artless, empty, bland, pale with newness.

Boldly, he leaned out further and looked down Parnassus Road. Not a soul. Country folk were supposed to get up early, but perhaps that was just another country myth, like the one that had everyone wearing Akubras.

His eye was caught by a movement in the laneway that ran along behind the shops. They did get up early after all, it was just that they stayed out of sight. Here, for example, was a young boy hurrying along on some early-morning country errand or other, almost running, late for the egg-collecting or the calf-feeding or whatever task it was that a young boy would be hastening to at this hour.

Sunlight was coming in over the shoulder of the Caledonian behind him, lying bent in a narrow band across the window opposite, slanting in on the floor. The bright patchwork was gone from under the camera: now it was something else the same size and shape, only darker. He took a good grip of the frame and leaned forward, and saw that it was the patchwork he had seen Harley Savage making. He recognised it by the squares and rectangles of light and dark, and the border that ran around the edge.

Then he noticed a little cloud of smoke coming up from behind the shop. It had a small cheerful look, as if someone had got the barbecue going. He could not see into the little yard, but listened for voices, although it seemed a funny time of day for a barbecue. The smoke simply puffed up in silence.

He turned back into the room, looked at his bed, the chenille bedspread that had slipped to the floor in the throes of his nightmare, the elastic-sided boots that still pinched, lined up neatly under the chair, the wardrobe door that would not close, swinging open to show his shirts. He was starting to hate Room 8, but it was still too early to go down to breakfast. In any case, having breakfast in the Dining Room, with the woman nodding and smiling at him in approval, was no better than being on his own in Room 8.

He had not spoken to Harley Savage since the day of the hot dry wind, when she had made it so clear that she would rather walk. He sat uncomfortably on the side of the bed in his checked pyjamas, holding the
Engineering Digest,
thinking about her so hard his thumb made a large damp smudge on the word
hydroscopic.
He had nearly killed her with dust from the ute. And he wished he had not smiled. He had seen the bumper stickers out here in the bush:
No Root No Ride.
She must have seen them too, and perhaps misunderstood his offer.

He turned back to the window: the big pale sky and the balmy movement of air made the room seem stuffier than ever. A few streets away another rooster had joined the first, greeting the day with long tragic crows that ended with a wistful dying fall.

The little cloud of smoke was thicker and blacker now, billowing up strongly.

He thought he could actually hear a crackle, as of fire blazing up around dry wood. He held his breath, listening. Definitely, crackling. As he watched he thought he saw a finger of yellow flame dart up suddenly from behind the roof.

This did not seem to be a barbecue.

Suddenly Karakarook was the emptiest place in the world. He leaned out as far as he dared to look along Parnassus Road. He was actually out of the window almost as far as his waist. He craned around, but nothing moved.

He went to his door, opened it on the dark stairway.
Excuse me,
he called. He heard his voice piping feebly into the heavy beer-smelling silence.
Oh, excuse me?
He peered into the gloom of the stairs above, hung on to the banister to look down to the ground floor.
Anyone there?

It seemed that no one was.

He went back to the window. The smoke was pouring up from behind the next-door roof in a steady thick stream now.

His mind was going very fast, skimming along through thoughts lined up neatly. There was a fire at the back of the shop. The fire was getting bigger. It would spread to the top of the shop. In the top of the shop was the patchwork that Harley Savage had made. If the fire was not stopped, the patchwork that Harley Savage had made would be destroyed. The fire would only stop if someone came to put it out. No one was coming to put it out yet. When they did, it would be too late.

There was a certain racy pleasure in the logic of it. His mind moved along the tops of the thoughts like a sheepdog over the backs of sheep, not stopping and slipping into the cracks between them. He clung to the windowsill, watching the smoke, with the thoughts tearing along towards their conclusion.

That was the trouble. At the end of this exhilarating rush of thoughts was one that he did not want to arrive at. It was waiting for him, and in the end he was afraid he would have to allow himself to think it.

It was like not looking down. It was possible to choose not to do it. It was possible to choose not to permit the thought that was waiting at the end of the other thoughts.

It was possible to choose not to hear the words,
I must climb into the window and rescue the patchwork.

He did not think.

He did not look down either, but felt the muscles in his shoulders take the weight as he hauled his body up, on to the windowsill —
Do not look down —
and out on to the metal grid of the fire-escape landing. The structure trembled under his weight, and he heard someone gasp. Hearing it, he felt fright pour through him like a fluid.

Everything went colourless: the brown-painted bricks of the wall of the Caledonian, inches away from him, were eerily crisp but in black-and-white. He could see the shape of every individual flake of paint, where it had cracked. He could see just how it happened, and his mind got to work telling himself the story. The bricks and the paint had heated and cooled with differential rates of expansion and contraction, you see. The paint would have had a certain fixed
modulus ofelasticity
but beyond that, at the
modulus of rupture
in fact, it would have cracked. In technical terms it was called
crazing.
Along the cracks, or
crazings,
it would pull away back into itself and form small patches.

He realised he had never really seen paint until now. He had definitely not given it the thought he should have. That had been an oversight, because it was really tremendously interesting.

He gripped the flimsy rail with both hands. The
crazings
in the paint felt like old friends now. He was going to keep watching them, while he lowered himself on to the step. He was not going to look away from them. Looking away would be a bad idea, because it might lead to looking down, and he must not look down. He was just going to go on watching his old friends, the bits of paint. It was lucky that there were so many of them.

Remarkable, how similar it was to his dream. He wondered if this was still part of the dream. That was a steadying thought to have, because in dreams he knew no one ever actually fell.

With the toes of his bare foot he found the first step. He found a particular little fragment of paint and kept watching it while his body followed his foot down on to the step, and then did it again for the next one, and the next.
Modulus of Elasticity,
he told himself.
Modulus of Rupture.
He attached his thoughts very firmly to the words.
Modulus of Elasticity.
They were like poetry, really.

When he got to the next landing he became aware that he was not actually breathing, and told himself to do so.
In. Out. In. Out.
Then he turned his head, very slowly and carefully, sideways.
Do not look down.

He reached out and dabbed the windowsill with a finger. It was not an optical illusion, it was as close as it looked. Now he could see inside quite clearly. The things he had taken for music-stands were in fact lamp-stands, of course, and he could see the camera now, a big serious-looking black box attached with a lot of G-clamps to a framework so it pointed down at the floor. And there was the patchwork.

It was ridiculous, really, having to do anything as primitively physical as climb in the window and pick it up. If you came right down to it, the patchwork was actually just a lot of molecules, and molecules were just a lot of electrical energy. It was only a matter of time before someone worked out how to transfer matter by molecular means. One of these days someone would work out how to contain that energy and move it to another place, and then let it out. It would put jumbo jets out of business, and it would mean that a brown patchwork could be safely moved out of a burning butcher’s shop without anyone having to do anything dramatic.

He waited a long time, but no one arrived to do a molecular transfer.

There was quite a strong smell of smoke now. Surely someone beside himself would smell it, or see it? The Fire Brigade would arrive any minute with hoses, ladders, extinguishers, and save him the trouble.

From where he now was he could only see a small slice of Parnassus Road. It was still obstinately empty. A kookaburra, perhaps the same one that had eyed him earlier, swooped across and perched on the facade of the Mini-Mart.

There was no one to hear, but he tried anyway.

Fire! he called out. Fire!

As he called, the kookaburra began a long robust laugh. Against it, his voice was tiny and smothered. He waited for the kookaburra to pause, and tried again.

Fire!

But the bird seemed to be waiting for him. As soon as he started, it started too.

He had been to dinner-parties like that.

Help!

It was a terrible, tiny, quavery voice. It could not possibly be his own. Nor could it possibly be he himself who was here on a rickety fire escape, preparing to climb over the railing and into a window a long way off the ground.

So it was not Douglas Cheeseman, and all the history of that man, who gripped the railing and, somehow, scrambled over. Now he was clinging to the outside of the fire-escape railing. It was some other man entirely who looked over his shoulder, and reached across with an uncertain hand to grip the windowsill of the shop.

It was someone acting at a great, vast distance who was actually spread out now, both hands clamped desperately to the windowsill, feet behind him on the fire escape, making a kind of bridge across the alley.

Whoever he was, he was not looking down. He was looking into the room, keeping his eyes firmly on the brown patchwork. He could see the squares and rectangles quite clearly now. He took a moment to consider counting them.
One, two, three.
He heard something creak, some joint in that other man’s knees, as he got a foot up and wedged it into the window frame, and now he had to pull himself right across. There was no choice involved, and certainly no courage.

His fingers gripped the frame, his face was jammed right up sideways against the wood of the sill. The paint on this window, colour white, was not crazed.
It is protected from the afternoon sun, you see,
he explained patiently, quietly, calmly, to the man who was hanging by his fingertips.
It is not subject to the same extremes of heat and cold, and thereby of expansion and contraction. Simple, isn’t it?

And now he was in the room — he himself — somehow having squeezed under the sash. He could feel a pain where his spine must have scraped something, and another where his elbow must have hit the window-frame. He was standing unsteadily, like a man on the deck of a boat. He seemed to have lost all sensation in his extremities, but he was in the room, and the patchwork was right beside him.

The first time he stooped for it, to snatch up a corner, he was too quick and missed, his hand scooping air, his nails scratching over the fabric without catching. The second time he got the corner but it was heavier than he had expected and he came up too quickly, and lost his grip. Finally he squatted down and gathered it into his chest, wrapping his arms right around it, and got it over to the window in a big lump, and clumsily shoved it out. He watched it fall, turning over, opening, flying, a corner streaming upward. Then it had spread itself out over the paving of the alley-way and lay still, and he was left hanging on to the window-frame, with the patchwork below swaying and spinning, and only his hands hanging on to the wood keeping him from falling.

DONNA HAD ORGANISED the tennis ladies into a working bee to stitch up a big red and black banner that stretched across the front of the Mechanics’ Institute:
Karakarook Pioneer Heritage Museum.
Mr Cutcliffe had got all the children into period clothes: the boys in their fathers’ waistcoats, and the girls in bonnets made out of cardboard and crepe paper. Music was provided by the young man from the garage and a few others, playing bottle-tops and washboards and saws. They were in period clothes too. Under home-made cabbage-tree hats, their faces were straight out of Freddy Chang’s old photos. On the patch of grass next to the Mechanics’ Institute, Chook had a demonstration of Bush Crafts going: a man with a big thick pioneer beard was turning chair-legs on a foot-operated bush lathe, and Chook himself had an array of axes and adzes and was making crude chairs and tables out of buttery new logs.