The Point (9 page)

Up close the swans’ feathers ruffle and frill over their rumps. Their beaks are vermilion, banded narrowly in white. The lake belongs to them. They march along it, swim across it, own it.

He might blunder about the library a bit, without his spectacles. He’d be able to read the books all right, once he found them, or somebody found them for him. But would there be someone? He doesn’t know how libraries work any more.

The woman with the pusher comes to the little beach and the small girl gets out. The woman gives her a plastic bag of bread. The birds know what this means and crowd round her. She throws the bread until it’s all gone. The birds hang about, still hopeful. The child sits on the back of her legs with the skill that children so soon lose and pokes the sand with a stick. The mother sits on the wall, tips her head back to the cool sun and shuts her eyes. After a bit the child hoists herself up, walks along the sand. He on his own piece of wall sits up straight. The child stands near him, elaborately ignoring him. Until she says, I’ve got two mummies.

That’s lucky, he says. His voice sounds rusty in his ears.

Yes, says the child. This one’s my tummy mummy.

I see. He wonders how long the mother will allow her to talk to this stranger.

My other mummy is my egg mummy.

Oh. And have you got a daddy?

The daddy. He’s just a sperm. Gary was a good choice.

Benison! calls the mother. She comes up and takes the child’s hand.

Good afternoon, he says. A fine day.

It’s getting cold, she says. Come on, Benison. Time to go.

Goodbye, he says, and the little girl gives him a quick wave. He thinks he can’t look too bad if this mother who’s a well-dressed woman in new jeans and boots, and the pusher a fancy affair with three-part wheels and a parasol, lets her daughter talk to him for this long. Maybe he could go to the library, and look up Spenser.

She’s right, it is cold. There’s a sneaky wind and the sky has suddenly filled with thundery clouds blocking out the sun. He pays a lot of attention to the sky and the clouds these days. Their scale is grand enough for his eyes to see. There’s an enormous expanse of them above this lake; they demand notice. He wonders if there are patterns in life, so that in the long run, and – this is important – it could be a very long run, time is given to all things necessary. In his other life he had never looked at the sky. Almost never. Except when it was exceptionally demanding. He remembers one evening when they were having people to dinner, friends they would have said but of course they were business friends and quick to disappear when the business wavered, and he came into the dining room with bottles of red wine to open and sit breathing on the sideboard. He hurried in with that efficient preoccupied speed that was the way he did everything in those days, and stopped short so that the bottles clanked and for a moment he feared the ten-year-old Penfolds (the poor-man’s Grange, people called it, though hardly for the poor) feared the bottles might have broken and spilled, for the room was awash with red. The sky was filled with puffy clouds and their swollen underbellies were stained with a bitter crimson sunset which spilled into his dining room and smeared the glasses, the cutlery, the white linen with colours of wine and blood. If I were superstitious, he thought, if I were a medieval person, or a credulous man who believes in signs, I would be filled with terror, but as it was he was filled with admiration for this dreadful sight, and paused and without looking at them uncorked the bottles and watched as slowly the blood faded to rust and then to pallid grey, when he pulled the thick velvet curtains which were a tasteful oyster colour and shut him inside more pallid greyness, and even switching on the lamps didn’t dispel the coldness to his eye. Next day he read in the paper that there had been bushfires fifty kilometres away that had filled the air with smoke and that was what caused the sunset reflections to smear themselves so luridly across his dining room.

Later still he thought he should have seen it as a portent, when he couldn’t keep up the credit card merry-go-round any longer and he borrowed from the trust fund and didn’t get it paid back in time and disgrace came and everything was lost, his wife his children his grandchildren, you understand, don’t you, Dad, it’s better if they don’t see you, if we all don’t really, better if they just don’t get to know you, now while they’re too young to remember, let alone house and friends, business or otherwise, and cars and antique furniture and unread books and fully stainless-steel kitchen with continental appliances and all that life he’d known, and left him daily examining these vast skies for any clues they might offer, or any comfort. Blood smearing the heavens, smearing his dining table, and then terrible events. Wasn’t it presumptuous to suppose you knew for certain they had no meaning? And wasn’t it equally presumptuous to suppose that something so grand as a red sunset and a sky filled with bushfire smoke was a message for one puny person? It’s all in the seeing, he thought. The world is full of warnings, the heeding of them is our choice.

And the fact was he didn’t miss those things because he’d never really had them. Sadness for the loss of his wife should have happened years ago, and it was hard to feel fond of a stainless-steel kitchen. He had more affection for his ferry-stop shelter. Where no ferries stopped. An admirable edifice, surprisingly cosy. It has a wooden base which could be meant to be boat-shaped and above that is glass, with pillars supporting a roof that has twirly bits like a pagoda. It’s painted blue, and serves to show how the lake never is. If you put your feet on the seat you are mostly safe from the wind. He hunkers down in a corner. Maybe Spenser’s bride rode across the water, in a barge, with banners. With the swans keeping the procession company. Not in this weather though. Getting on for red wine time. But maybe a bit of a doze first. He is impressed with how well he sleeps these days. Never anything to worry about, nothing on his mind. He sleeps the sleep of the innocent. The untrammelled. He wonders what untrammelled really means. What is trammelling?

He senses rather than sees the other person. Opens his eyes, squints, recognises the jumper, not the person, a skinny striped thing that he last saw cuddled up to The Point’s refrigerator vents. The person is female, as he’d guessed, a waif, thin, and her flesh a mauve-white bruised colour. Her hair is stringy, brown from the roots then halfway down turning brass-yellow blonde in a jagged stripe, and her eyes are enormous and purple-smudged. He can’t tell whether it’s cold or dirt or something else that gives her this purplish-mauve colour. She clutches her arms across her chest and her right hand smoothes her hair behind her ear, over and over in a lifting and smoothing gesture, though her hair is greasy and stays where she puts it. He lifts his feet off the seat and unhuddles. If he was his father and wearing a hat he’d tip it.

Is this taken, she asks, and he replies, No, feel free. It’s a bit sheltered from the wind. Not a lot.

He realises that she’s shivering. But he has nothing to help except his own closeness and knows better than to offer that. This waterfront is so tidy, no newspaper or old cartons, no old rugs or bits of rag.

He offers his scarf, just for a moment, he says, not to keep, but she refuses. I’m always cold, she says, I’ll stop shivering in a minute.

She sits and stares at nothing with eyes so big in her face they must make it ache.

He closes his again but no longer feels dozy.

My name is Clovis, he tells her.

Really? No kidding?

Why should I say it was if it weren’t?

All kinda reasons, but hey, okay, if you say it’s Clovis then Clovis it is. What sort of name is it, anyway.

It’s the name of French kings.

I suppose that’s why it’s news to me.

There’s another silence. He asks, What’s your name?

She gives him a look. Gwyneth.

That’s an unusual name.

No it’s not. There’s … She stops, and gives him another look that he is starting to think might be crafty. Well, my parents had kinda funny ideas. She says again, Funny ideas, as though there is something bitter about the flavour of the words in her mouth.

Do you live here, she asks.

Round about.

Have you for long?

Yes.

Don’t you have anywhere else to go?

Possibly.

You mean you choose to live here?

We always choose our lives, he says, even if we do not know we are doing so.

No, she says, no, some of us have no choice, no choice at all.

So we may choose to believe.

No, it’s not true, she says. Fuck, who’d choose … She stamps her feet on the seat, drumming them violently until she falls back exhausted.

Would you like some red wine, he asks.

You got any?

Would I offer if I didn’t?

Yeah. Well, you might. Some people would.

Wait here, he says.

In a few minutes he is back. In one hand he has a pair of handsome oval glasses. Hold these, he says. Be careful.

When he passes them to her it is apparent that they are broken off at the stem. The bowls are their perfect curving selves, but they have snapped somewhere in their long stems, and lack feet.

One night I was going past the restaurant, he says, and there was a box of empty bottles outside. And on the top four glasses. One had a cracked bowl, but the others had snapped stems. Must have been a design fault. Or maybe nervous diners.

He takes a cask of wine out of his bag. Only rough red, he says. Château Cardboard.

Gwyneth holds out the glasses and he fills them half full. Gwyneth downs hers in several long swigs and holds the glass out again.

Steady on, he says. It occurs to him that maybe wine isn’t the best thing to be giving this waif.

It makes me feel better, she says, and he pours her another glass, not stopping halfway this time, realising that this is a carryover from the days of drinking wine that demanded sniffing and tasting and not at all necessary for plonk out of a bladder.

Are you planning to stay long, he asks.

I dunno. I’ve got to think. When she says this the expression on her face moves from baffled to blank, dead almost. It seems to him an expression that’s the negation of thought. He squirts some more wine into her outstretched glass.

Lucky there’s more where that came from, he says. He’s okay for money, there’s not a lot to spend his money on, and if she knocks off most of this, well, he can get cleaned up and go and look at Spenser tomorrow.

The girl tries to lean back into the corner of the shelter but it’s too hard against her bony little body and she sits up and hunches down into herself. Tell me your story, he says, and she looks at him, a mixture of her crafty and her baffled looks and is silent. After her fourth glass of wine, she suddenly says, Gotta go. She stands up, stretches, says, See ya, and makes off up the slope.

He dips the glasses in the lake, sloshes them about, shakes them dry. A glass like these should be dried with a fine linen cloth, but even puddled and murky and without a foot it is still a beautiful piece of work. He doesn’t care, it’s a vessel, that’s all.

The sunset is reddish again tonight, muddy against the thunder-purple clouds. Clovis looks at it and remembers the blood-red sunset staining his dining room, but as though it had happened to another person. Whom he observes, but is not. Observes the rage of those days, that what was nearly so perfectly well done should have at the last minute gone wrong, and his shame that he should have committed – should have needed to commit? – so criminal an act, and grief that his family should so entirely cast him off. No affection, no care, no flash of gratuitous love.

He’d gone to live homeless like Lear fleeing into the wilderness, away from the ingratitude of family, the Lear image his, how he saw himself, and intended to be short-term, a gesture, no, more than a gesture, an act, but not one that needed to be maintained. And yet it had been, here he was; that other fellow, the Lear character, might have gone back to some version of his own world, but Clovis somehow did not. This Clovis character looked at the world with his own blunt eyes and its hazy shapes were sufficient puzzle to his mind. He no longer raged, but he had not gone back.

It was you might say
Lear
that had brought him undone. A gala charity premiere, famine in Africa or something, at the Seymour Centre, with champagne and caviar and the people who went to that sort of thing. Did they see any ironies in a performance of
King Lear
in these circumstances, he wondered, but not at the time. At that time he paid the large sum the tickets cost on one of his credit cards, and so did Lindi, the new dress she had to have, since the people who went to that sort of thing had all seen her old ones, other ones, and suddenly it was too much;
King Lear
and a new dress a small thing in the context, a straw of a thing, and suddenly his camel was belly-flopped in the dust, its legs splayed, its spine cracked, and all its precious load scattered and irredeemable.

He often thought of that camel. It was out of a painting one of his great-aunts had, mostly rather sepia, with a brilliant orange sunset, a desert sunset he supposed, and some palm trees in black lines against this coloured sky. The camel still unbroken.

How sharply he’d seen that performance of
Lear
, how clearly and brightly, from the best seats in the house and through one of his several pairs of up-to-the-minute prescription glasses. He remembered it very well.

Remembered that Lear had fled into his own particular wilderness – it was a renovated
Lear
, set in Fascist Italy, and it was the rubble of a bombed town rather than a desolate moor – and run mad for a while, but in the end, for a moment, redemption had come. Even if death had followed soon after. His daughter Cordelia had saved him and for a little while there had been love. Simple, perfect love.

Well, his daughters wouldn’t come and find him. They were more in the Goneril and Regan mould. Were paying him to stay away, organising it, with their brothers. A small stipend, Dad, and stay away. Not even a sacrifice on their part. His edifice had collapsed, but there were plenty of assets. It was his own money they were paying him. And he was spending it on Château Cardboard. Excellent stuff it was too.