Annabelle closed the drawer and went downstairs and into the kitchen. She stood at the sink looking out into the darkening garden. She drank a glass of water, her ghostly reflection suspended in the windowglass, gazing back at her, detached and incurious, as if from a place in the future already far removed from this moment. Their carefully tended patch of lawngrass beyond the shade umbrella and the table and the Weber was vivid green, sparkling with raindrops in the evening light—the golden, the honeyed, halflight of evening . . . Annabelle was seeing her husband with the young girl on the cover of
Tush
. He was naked, standing behind the girl making love to her. Of course he couldn’t possibly be with that girl. She knew the girl he was with. She knew he had let himself be seduced by one of his Honours students. A voluptuous Israeli woman, dark, intense, self-assured and aggressive. Twenty-two at the most. Annabelle had teased him about the way this young woman had stared at him at a faculty evening and he had laughed and kissed her and said not to be so stupid. He had written in his note that he was very, very sorry for what he had done. He still loved her, he wrote. He would always love her. Nothing, he wrote, could ever change that. She must know it. He would not hurt her for the world. He had written that perhaps it would not work out for him with this young woman and that she should think of it as an aberrant episode, a brief rite of passage, if you like, that men need to pass through before they can settle down and grow old with dignity and grace. We may even find, he wrote, that it is genetically determined. But at any rate, when it is over with Sara, you and I will surely look back upon this episode as if it has been a soul cleansing for me. Annabelle had never heard Steven speak of his soul before. His midlife crisis, he wrote, though this was not a term he cared for, it was nevertheless a term he found it useful to employ on this occasion. He knew, he assured her, that he would come back to her, perhaps quite soon. Sooner than they could imagine. But for the time being he had moved in with the darkly beautiful girl who had worn the uniform of a soldier and seen the corpses of young men lying in the streets and whose gaze was still and deep and strong and whose body had cast a spell over him . . . He had not planned it, he wrote. She must not believe that of him. He had not planned to hurt her. It had happened between himself and Sara one evening in his room at the university and now he was powerless to resist. It had been like an accident. Unforseen and unpreventable. As inevitable almost as an act of God . . . While she was reading the letter Annabelle felt his lust for the girl seeping into it, as if he could not resist boasting of his passion to her and might at any moment begin to describe the details of their lovemaking. She might think of him, he wrote, as suffering a kind of moral trauma. It had been as much a surprise to him as it would be to her when she read this letter. He was confident, however, he ended, that with the passing of time she would come to forgive him and that they would once again be together as they had always been, their trust restored . . .
Annabelle set the empty glass on the draining board. She wiped her cold lips with her fingers and took out her mobile from the sidepocket of her jacket. She switched the phone on and entered her code. The smiling face on the illuminated screen advised,
CODE ACCEPTED
:
Human Technology.
An invitation to search the menu. She was trembling. One by one she considered her friends and closest colleagues at the university. When she thought of these women listening at the other end of the phone, however, she knew she could not confide her story or her emotions to any of them at this moment. In the normal course of her life there could only have been one person to whom she would have spoken of something so devastating, so intimate and so shocking as this, and that person was Steven, her husband . . . Her stomach felt suddenly heavy and bloated and she thought she was going to be sick. She pulled out a chair from the table and sat down. The Greeks shouted joyfully to each other next door, the smell of their cooking fish sweetened with the aroma of dill . . . She sat at the kitchen table for a long time, until it was night and the room was in darkness, illuminated by the nightglow of the city sky, the eye of the green dial on the oven, the seconds counting over on the clock on the refrigerator. The unnatural stillness of the house making her a stranger in this familiar place. Once she started in alarm, swinging around to look behind her towards the passage, thinking she heard someone at the street door . . .
Both Annabelle’s parents were dead, but she now pictured them as if they were still living. They had loved her devotedly and would have been stricken for her at this moment, sharing her humiliation and incomprehension, wounded by the injustice of her betrayal. The two of them growing old and frail together in the rambling weatherboard house on Zamia Street in Townsville—the way their eyes would meet and the way they would not speak openly of such a difficult and unseemly thing as this, but would each know the other’s mind and would bear it in silence . . . Tropical North Queensland. Thousands of kilometres from Melbourne. It was another country. She had neglected the old connections. She had not even visited Townsville for three years, since the tragic death of Allan Templeman, her sister’s husband, in a car smash on the Bruce Highway. She would have telephoned Elizabeth now but her sister was travelling somewhere in Italy with her son, Peter. There was only one person in Townsville at this moment to whom she could appeal for a hearing. Susan Bassett was a woman of Steven’s age. Unmarried and childless, she had been a friend and colleague in the department of history in Melbourne until she turned her back on academia and went alone to Townsville to set up the first cultural survey business in North Queensland to service the requirements of the new Cultural Record Act. But Annabelle had neglected this friendship too and had not been in touch since Allan Templeman’s funeral, when she and Susan had had lunch together. Annabelle checked the phone book on her mobile. Susan’s number was not on it. She rang directory assistance and gave them Susan’s name and the name of her street in Townsville. When the recorded voice directed her to press 1 if she wanted to be connected or to wait if she wanted to hear the number, she pressed 1 and listened to the number dialling out. Perhaps it was the distance and the absence of recent contact between them that gave her the courage to ring Susan Bassett. For in a way she knew that in telephoning this woman she was telephoning another reality, and did not really expect to make contact with it. The number rang once then was answered.
‘Hello, Susan Bassett.’
Annabelle couldn’t speak.
‘Hel-lo!’
‘It’s Annabelle Küen,’ she murmured.
‘Annie! What a lovely surprise. We were only talking about you the other day. You’re not in Townsville are you? Are you coming up to see us?’
‘I’m in Melbourne.’
There was a pause.
Susan said uncertainly, ‘Are you okay?’ Her voice took on a note of concern, ‘Has something happened?’
‘Steven’s left me.’
‘God! When did this happen?’
‘Tonight. Just now.’
‘You’re serious?’
‘I don’t know what to do. I didn’t know who to talk to. I’m sorry to bother you.’
Susan said with gentle concern, ‘You’re not bothering me, Annie. I’m very glad you rang me. We have to think of what you must do.’
‘I’m scared he might come back. I thought I heard him at the front door before. I couldn’t bear it. I can’t bear the thought of seeing him or hearing his voice. He’s moved in with one of his students.’ Her voice broke and she began to sob.
‘O Annie! This is horrible. What can I do? There must be something I can do.’
‘Nothing. You can’t do anything. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have rung you. I feel as if he’s beaten me. I feel as if he’s turned on me and beaten me to the ground. Enraged. His teeth clenched. Not saying anything. Not giving me any reason. Smashing me as hard as he can. Steven,’ she said helplessly, ‘I can’t believe it’s him. It’s like he’s an insane stranger. I keep wanting to ring my old Steven, the kind one, the real one, the gentle one, and tell him to come home and help me.’ She wept, sucking her breath and gasping into the mobile. ‘He thinks I’m going to forgive him. I can’t bear the thought of ever seeing him again.’ The sobs engulfed her. ‘I’m terrified he’ll come home and I’ll have to face him. I’m scared, Sue. I know he’s going to suddenly come through the front door. I couldn’t face him.’
There was a long pause. Susan said firmly, ‘Pack some things and get on a plane at once and come up to Townsville. Do it now. I’ll ring and book you on a flight.’
Annabelle blew her nose and wiped at her face with her handkerchief. ‘Do you really think I should?’
‘You’ve still got Zamia Street, haven’t you? You and Elizabeth haven’t sold the old place, have you?’
‘No. We keep meaning to. We had tenants there for a while.’
There was a silence.
Susan Bassett said, ‘Pack some things and get a cab out to the airport. Pick up your ticket when you get there. I’ll ring them now. Don’t stay in that house a minute longer.’
‘He’ll follow me. He’ll track me down. He’ll know I’ve gone to Townsville.’
‘No he won’t. I have to go to Burranbah tomorrow. Come with me. The Burranbah job will take me at least a week. We can pretend you’re my assistant. It’ll give us time to think of something. He’ll have no idea where you are. Leave a message at work to say you’re sick. Do it now, Annie. I’ll meet you at the Townsville airport.’
Annabelle said, ‘I completely lost my poise then. I’m sorry.’
‘
Poise
for God’s sake! Christ, you’d have to be a bloody robot to be poised at a moment like this.’
‘I feel calmer already just talking to you. Thanks Sue.’
‘Hang up and ring a cab at once. I’ll be at the airport. Okay?’
‘Okay . . . Thanks. You always were incredibly strong.’
‘Nonsense. Just do it.’
Annabelle took a deep breath; behind her pain she detected a flicker of curiosity at the thought of what was happening to her life—the ghostly reflection of herself in the kitchen window, observing her distress from the incurious detachment of a future time. ‘All right, I’ll do it. You don’t have to be at the airport. I’ll go to Zamia Street.’
‘I’ll be at the airport. Hang up and ring a cab.’
B
URRANBAH WAS A COAL TOWN UP IN THE LONELY CATTLE COUNTRY
west of the Carborough Ranges, three hundred kilometres inland from Mackay and a good eight or nine hours drive down the eastern seaboard from Townsville. Susan and Annabelle loaded the gear into Susan’s Pajero the night before and left Townsville in the dawnlight the next morning, heading south along the Bruce Highway, Susan keeping her foot down hard and swearing at the trucks and caravans that were slowing them. She held the trembling steering wheel with one hand, her back pressed hard against the seat, leaning her free elbow out the sidewindow, counting roadkilled wallabies along the verge. She shouted above the roadnoise, ‘You never see a dead crow. They feed out there near the wheels and never get hit. I’ve been looking out for one ever since I came up here.’ She was a big energetic woman, dressed in faded khaki overalls and walking boots. An old brown trilby hat, sweat stained and misshapen, set back on her cropped grey hair. ‘Crows!’ she yelled admiringly. ‘See them birds step aside!’
They had sat up until the early hours at Susan’s flat, drinking red wine and talking about Steven Küen and the evil ways of men, going over old memories of their time together in Melbourne and lamenting the deteriorated culture of universities and the decline of civilised standards in general. They had both done a lot of laughing and crying by the time they finally went to bed. After two hours sleep Susan woke Annabelle at five with a cup of tea. They gave breakfast a miss and were in the Pajero speeding down the highway before Annabelle’s dreams had faded from her mind. Riding beside her friend now Annabelle was in a state of heightened nervousness, a peripheral anxiety teasing her expectations—the events of the past forty-eight hours and the landscape speeding by too fast for her to keep up. She shouted across at her older companion—older than her by the same margin that Steven was older than her, ‘You haven’t told me about any of
this
yet. If I’m going to be your assistant, I’ll need to know what’s going on. I don’t even know why you’re doing this survey in the first place. Everyone will think I’m an idiot.’
Susan yelled back, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. There’s nothing to know. Before they can open up a new section of their coal lease the company has to survey the area for evidence of previous Indigenous and European occupation.
Significant
occupation, they call it.’ She laughed drily. ‘The idea is that they don’t obliterate any more history than they absolutely have to. Which can still mean they obliterate all of it before they’re done. Every development up here has to have an approved cultural survey before it can go ahead these days. That’s what I do. That’s the business. Bowen Basin Archaeological Surveys Pty Ltd. That’s me! The meat in the sandwich between the traditional owners and the multinationals. Everybody needs me. Everybody hates me,’ she yelled gaily. ‘The local Indigenous community hire me to help them do the surveys and write the reports. They send along a couple of their cultural field officers who are supposed to know the country and we search the area together for evidence of the old people. I record our finds on the GPS and the mine foots the bill. The cost is nothing to the mine. It’s the delays they can’t stand, the leisurely pace of life out here. The Murris don’t work to whitefeller schedules. That’s not the way it is.’ She fell silent, pulling out into the oncoming lane and concentrating on passing a semitrailer. ‘Come on, darling! Come
on
!’ she urged the Pajero. She made it past the semi and pulled back in, the oncoming truck flashing its lights at her. ‘Yeah, yeah, okay, I see you.’ She settled herself in the seat again. ‘What were we talking about?’
‘You were doing the survey.’
‘After we’ve done the survey, I eventually produce location maps of the artefact scatters from the GPS records, and whatever other stuff we come across in our search of the country, then I submit the written report to the Murris. It can all take a considerable while. There’s a lot of politics gets mixed up in it before it’s done. We’ll dignify this one with the title Burranbah Coal Cultural Heritage Study, and if the Japanese are still buying coal by the time everyone’s approved it, the company will get down there and dig out its little seam of black gold.’ She waved out the sidewindow, ‘Another scrub wallaby! That’s fifteen not including your side. This road’s a meatworks for the crows.’ She fell back into a singsong recitation, ‘The reports include an archaeological assessment of the significance of the finds and a management plan for any sites we think ought to be preserved or restored.’ She reached around behind her seat, feeling about among the litter of papers and empty soft drink cans, the speeding Pajero veering out into the oncoming lane then swerving in again. She pulled out a spiral bound wad of manuscript. ‘Here!’ She dropped the manuscript on Annabelle’s lap. ‘Have a look at that. It’s a draft of one we did for a cable rollout for Telstra last year. They’ve rejected the recommendations. It’s not settled yet. It’s a game we play. They can’t roll their cable till the Murris say so. There’s a lot of power in that.’