The Point (13 page)
Brad is …
My little boy. He’s three.
Clovis thinks, this child has a child?
But then I got back in again.
She keeps stopping, and it is hard for Clovis to know whether to give her little pushes with his own words to get her going again or just wait.
What happened?
Parole. Breaking parole. But then I get out again. She sniffs and wheezes and her breath sobs in her throat. Well, I’m … you know, don’t you … don’t tell me you didn’t know, I need my methadone. I go down to the doctor with Saul, that’s my de facto, no he’s not Braddy’s dad, and I couldn’t believe it, they kept me waiting, three quarters of an hour, and Brad’s running around, he’s going spare, that’s no place for a little kid, so next time I went on me own, without Saul, and that’s when things went wrong, didn’t they. There was some Rohypnol, so I took it, that’s good stuff that is, handy to have, it was just there, I know I shouldn’t have, and then I was going home and I just wanted to get Braddy some things …
You mean, shoplifting, says Clovis.
Yeah, and I got m’self some underwear, it’s nice to have nice underwear, and perfume and jeans and things and if I hadna been on my own it would never have happened, I shouldna been on my own. So I’m back in again.
I see.
Well, I got out again. Just for a bit. It was my stepfather, he died. Daryl. The funeral, and all, they let me go to it. But everybody was horrible. They reckoned I killed him.
But you were in gaol.
When I was a kid he abused me, and I said I was gunna tell people, and he said he’d hurt me if I did. But then when I was in gaol I thought it’d be all right so I said about it. I was threatening him, they reckoned, they reckoned that’s what killed him. Oh, so I killed him, did I, he died of cirrhosis of the liver, I suppose what I said caused that. When it was long past time he should of died, the rotten old bugger. Been bashing my mum for years. And still she said I was lying
She’s just sipping the wine now, staring past the footless glass, running her finger over the broken edge of the stem till the blood bubbles up.
And now?
Well, I’m on the run, aren’t I. So I can’t go to Mancare, can I. Or off buying wine.
Where’s Saul now?
Back in Cowra, with Brad. My mum’s there too.
She pulls up the striped jumper and feels inside her bra, pulling out some pills. She smiles slyly up at him, and sighs. Only enough for a coupla weeks.
And then what?
She shrugs. He understands that she’s quite drunk after all this wine. She can name her troubles, but not at this moment think of what to do about them. It occurs to him that she possibly never can.
Are you eating, he asks.
There’s a restaurant just there, she says, pointing her thumb over her shoulder. The food’s pretty good.
You don’t …
Not the garbage bins. It’s just there. In plastic bags, beside the bottles. Quite nice and clean. Real fancy stuff. Can’t be fussy, but.
She dozes in the corner of the ferry-stop shelter. It’s quiet, nobody around. A powerboat is making its way up the lake. The police. Nobody else is allowed powerboats on the lake. He doesn’t think they’re looking for Gwyneth. But quite soon, he supposes, they will find her.
Nevertheless, on his way to buy the wine he calls in at the Salvation Army shop. No overcoats, the young snap them up as soon as they come in, they’re a fashion item. He finds a thick knitted jacket, long and large with a deep turned collar, grey in colour, and lined with some padded material. She can wrap herself in it like a blanket.
He wonders what will happen when the methadone runs out.
Often have I written on these pages that I was in love with Flora, and it is not possible to write it too many times. But notice I also said we all were. We all adored her, anyway, which may not quite be the same as being in love, but we did adore her, this un-young waif who made amazing meals for us, and our eating them was the consummation of our love for her. At the beginning I did not see myself as any different from the others, I mean the regulars, us addicted ones, who kept coming back, except I saw what we were doing, and put it into words. I am not sure that the others did.
You often hear about the meal as metaphor for sex. What about sex as metaphor for the meal? You start with the visit to the beloved, with a certain tentativeness. To begin with there are words: the menu that you read with your eyes and with the tastebuds of your imagination. This is desire. It has been with you since long before you picked up the menu. At this point all things are possible. It is perhaps the most exciting part of the meal because so far no choices have been made, which inevitably will narrow and confine the experience. The wine comes; this is like the first sweet kisses. We sip kisses like wine; we sip wine like kisses.
So we move to the entree, the foreplay. The main course, the climax. The dessert, the delicious aftermath. And so out into the cold night. (It is true, a lover may not dismiss you so abruptly as a meal, once it is all over. Though she may.) The end of the climax, the main course, is sad, always, it means the best is over. The dessert can’t hide the end from us, it’s at its best a postponement. Maybe the night won’t be cold, will be balmy, and we can wander through it nursing our memories of the pleasures of that recent intercourse and the melancholy of its passing. Though the melancholy is sweet, since the pleasure will be renewed, we have faith in that.
Oh yes, we can come back again. And our beloved the meal will always be there, waiting with a variety more infinite than Cleopatra’s. So when I say we were all in love with Flora it was Flora in her food that I mean, and none of us thought that she could ever belong to just one of us.
At this time in my life I was happy. So I said to myself. I had my work, which was going remarkably well, the business in the clever hands of the children was gathering clients and pleasing them and making money, and my own studies were progressing. I sometimes remembered Anabel and my passion for her, but I knew that passion doesn’t last. The baby she killed I still grieved for, but let’s not talk about that. Not now. Sometimes I went about with handsome women, less often to bed with them. I didn’t often take them to The Point, that could have resembled an orgy.
I lived in my house in Barton, I lived the good life. I was happy, I said. I was not unhappy. I was content. In the sense that what I was trying to do I thought I could do. Hadn’t done it, but didn’t see that I wouldn’t, that I shouldn’t.
One night I had been working late; my lads long gone, I thought I would wander across to The Point, drink a bottle of wine, eat some cheese; it would be too late for dinner, most likely.
But even if it was too late for me to eat I could watch the other guests in the last transports of their meal. Does that make me a voyeur? Oh yes. The religious life is a life that watches, that trains itself to the regarding of others. Their sins, and perhaps their joys too, their struggles and cares.
I walked across, I hadn’t given that up simply because some louts in a car nearly killed me.
But when I got there it was long too late for me to be a voyeur of other people’s eating. The restaurant door was open but when I went in the room was empty, tidied and fresh and ready for the next day. Flora was standing on the terrace, nursing her elbows, gazing out across the lake. Through the open door shone yellow bands of light. And music.
I danced with her. I do not know how to dance. The music was boys’ voices singing a psalm, Parry perhaps. Not music for dancing. And yet, there on the terrace, I took her in my arms, not like a lover but like a partner, and gravely we danced, our bodies turning but not touching, our feet interleaving, in a pattern mine didn’t know it knew. Until the music stopped. And we stopped, and looked across the dark glimmering lake.
Would you like a glass of wine, she said.
I did not need wine. I was intoxicated by the way our bodies had spoken, without needing words. But I said yes. Yes. She brought white wine in big transparent globes and the moon rose and shone upon them, they were like our own moons in our hands. That was the feeling. My own moon held in my hand, mine to hold, while the great yellow moon of heaven rose in the sky. And I thought, this is being in love, and I have not known it before.
I look at these words and see how beautiful they are on the page. Round and black, firm, shapely, with a fine calligraphic rhythm. As beautiful as the moment they annotate. I would like the moment to be always this moment, as it may be, here, in the perfection of this recording of it. The moon forever hanging in the sky, the glasses in our hands, and I forever knowing what love is.
Well. Words may stop the moon in the sky. Life cannot.
I have been and made my dinner, stopped writing for a moment. A boiled egg, a cup of tea, bread and butter. A childish meal, and such comfort in it. And now I sit down again to my page.
The moon. Stopping the moon. Good grief. Should I cross it out? But my rule is not to reread, so I cannot do that.
Anyway, there it is, my falling in love with Flora the woman, not the cook, surprising and unexpected and maybe even unlikely, as falling in love so often is. And there is another beginning, if you like. So many beginnings, and all the same end.
On winter mornings the fog hangs over the lake and its shores so nothing can be seen but thick wet whiteness. Eventually it starts to shred and allow angles of the landscape to become visible. A corner of the metal octagon forming The Point, for instance. Clovis opens his eyes to the mist and wonders how much is in his eyes and how much around him. That’s a game he plays with himself.
One morning he looks across to the restaurant and beyond it sees an activity he can’t understand. He knows he can see well enough to function in the world of his short sight because his reason supplies much of what his eyes can’t decipher. He likes the idea that it is reason seeing for him and not idle thoughtless mechanical sight, but this morning reason fails him. There is something happening, figures, busy movement, indiscernible objects, but he can’t tell what. He dips his fingers in the icy lake and wipes his face. He forgets how long you survive if you fall in: is it one or two minutes, or two or three? Not long enough to get rescued, anyway. Then he walks warily towards the restaurant. There isn’t usually anybody about it at this hour.
There’s a bloke and a girl. They’ve got a great pile of longish whippy sticks, poles, what would you call them, canes maybe, and a few tools, strange knives, secateurs, a thing for poking holes in the ground, a dibbler, that’s the word for it. Morning, they say, in a natural way. Clovis is surprised because usually he’s invisible. Good morning, he says, his voice creaky. He finds himself stopping, not sloping off as he usually would, stopping and staying to watch.
The bloke looks a bit like him. Beard, rumpled coat. Rather more mud than he allows himself. The girl in a parka. Scarves, caps, no gloves. They are fixing the sticks in holes they make in the ground then bending and plaiting them into a pattern of diamond shapes, grafting them where they cross and knotting them together with quick intricate knots. He knows they are intricate because of the speed and complexity with which their hands move, not because he can see much of the final tie.
Cold weather for it, says Clovis, squinting at their blue hands.
Got to be. Got to be midwinter, just the moment when the sap starts to rise, but before your wands start to leaf up.
They work silently, deft and long practised. Clovis watches.
Can I ask … what you are doing?
A double diamond trellis, says the girl.
It’s your willow, says the man. It’s a sculpture it’s making.
So, do you have to do it on the site? Couldn’t you, well, make it in a studio and bring it and install it?
Oh no, they’ve got to grow, see? We’re planting them, they’ll take root and grow. It’s a living sculpture. Living leafing wands of willow.
We’re willow weavers, says the girl.
They speak slowly, comfortably, telling him things but not yapping on, their hands plaiting and knotting, dextrous and quick. He’s standing quite close now, peering, not crowding them, but leaning to see close. The knots are willow too, fine fronds of it, the way they twine and twist and fold in and over is a little work of art by itself. They remind him of some lace makers he saw in Belgium once, only the scale is grand and the raw material long whippy canes, not thread.
