The Best Australian Stories (52 page)

Kirsten sighed, and turned over onto her flank. Time to let the long night of water-sleep draw in on her, and burying her face she snuggled down deep into her padded cocoon. Now, once again, she could feel the buoyant curve of the narrow boat beneath her, rocking gently to the familiar slop, slop of water against the stern, while outside there hummed the deep stillness of the countryside. And all the while she was moving inwards, floating on a slow tide of surrender, floating towards the turning wheel of the lock. Sleep, she thought, savouring the word … sleep. And drifting off into the limp repose of the convalescent, she wondered if that baby had ever learned to swim.

The New Dark Age

Joan London

Now that the long winter was over, and all the clues to his convalescence, the little table by the couch for his books and remote controls, the earthenware pot for Chinese herbs, the meditation tapes, had been packed away, now that he'd resumed his place in the world, George was conscious more and more of a twinge of misgiving, like guilt or nostalgia, as if for something or someone he missed.

In the shop, old customers and friends congratulated him on his recovery, with eyes that followed his to avoid looking at the thinness of his body. He said
cancer
whenever necessary, not ‘sick' or ‘unwell', in the same way that he'd said
die
, refusing ‘pass away'
.
Back from the brink, he discovered that he had an urge to bear testimony. What was his message? What did he have to tell them?

Every time he tried to collect his thoughts, someone interrupted him. Of course he was tired. The lunchtime rush made him dizzy. There was also the Rip Van Winkle effect: he had just installed the computer when he left for hospital, leaving Ulla to wage a single-handed battle with its teething problems, and she was now very much the expert. She'd even fed a ‘Welcome Back George' logo onto their receipts, though he soon put a stop to that. In a return to their old sparring form, she accused George of being a Luddite. Not at all, he told her gravely, modern pharmacology had saved his life.

It was his tenth day back, but still the shop did not look like his. There was a subtle change of direction in the stock. Ulla, not having strong musical tastes herself, always responded to the market. They now sold a lot of pop and rock, Alanis Morissette and Nirvana, and compilations of World Music, and more well-known classical pieces, especially if they'd become a movie theme. Meanwhile Country and Western, contemporary jazz, the avant-garde, had dwindled, gone ragged, lost their edge. Some of these he found in a newly labelled bin, ‘Discount Discs'
.
Ulla had the print-outs to justify her decisions, but he noted that some of his favourite customers, the ones for whom he put aside new recordings if he thought they'd like them, had trickled away.

All this of course he could turn around in a few weeks. The thought made him weary. Although he'd always said that
George's
was just a way of making money to support his music habit, there was a time when he'd been happy to feed it all his energy and creativity, and taken pride in its success, but that seemed long ago. Now he wondered if he was really suited to being a businessman. Out the window the newly renovated arcade with its little trickling fountain looked like a film set. People ambled past, licking icecreams, bathed in a kind of cathedral twilight. It all looked false to him, temporary, unreal. He'd preferred the old premises, between
Perretti Tailors
and the
Wing Lo Deli
. Perhaps the rot had started to set in a couple of years ago, when they moved into the smarter end of town.

But what would he rather be doing?

Late in the afternoon, on impulse, he put on the little Brahms intermezzo which he had listened to all through the winter. At once he was taken back, so intensely that he felt exposed, and went to listen in the office. What an austere, intense winter it had been, his season of reckoning. Day after day he lay on the couch as the leaves fell in the courtyard and his life unravelled before him. He was like a monk, in loose clothes, his bald head covered by the dark red Tibetan beanie Kristina had found for him. There seemed to be a ring of silence around him. Chaste, isolated, engrossed, he was cut off from everyone except Kristina. His daughter Grace sent him loving postcards from South America where she was travelling with her boyfriend. He had Kristina to himself. He waited all day for the sound of her key in the door and the sight of her tired, pale face with its new anxiety and kindness. He couldn't have survived without her.

In the cruel, colourless twilights he saw that all his time had been spent in accommodating people, keeping the show on the road, in compromise and self-deception. So here you are, the little melody seemed to say, this after all is how it is. He felt as if the most innocent part of him had sat down and wouldn't go on.

*

Before the piece had ended he realised that the shop was empty; no browser could bear too much of Brahms's penetrating sadness. Ulla had turned to look at him through the glass partition of the office. Their eyes met as she peered over the top of her tortoiseshell glasses and he saw the sharp, watchful query in them.

He watched her moving on along the shelves, with her cropped grey hair and her habitual white shirt and black slacks, her diligence like a reproach to him. She felt his distance, sensed that everything had changed. He knew her ethics, her sense of fitness. She had not received her due. Not that there hadn't been lavish thanks, and a generous bonus. But she deserved to share, however symbolically, in his recovery. She had contributed to it. She expected a gesture of acknowledgment.

Still affected by the spirit of the music, he walked out of the office and asked her home to dinner.

As soon as he issued the invitation, he regretted it. Ulla pulled out a bus timetable from her bag and pushing on her glasses, consulted it. She announced she would have to catch two buses. He'd forgotten the whole painful ritual. Ulla, for reasons of her own, did not drive, but utilised very ingeniously the scanty public transport system. She tackled travelling arrangements with an air of moral challenge. She was skilled at arranging lifts from neighbours, friends, even customers. Also she walked great distances. She was solid and fit with tanned san-dalled feet and a healthy flush on her cheeks.

Years ago, when he first opened
George's
, she often used to come to dinner with Grace and him. She always arrived early, sometimes hours early, so that she ended up chopping parsley, walking the dog, reading bedtime stories to Grace.

He'd just come from a bad divorce and knew nothing of business. In that first year there was no detail of his new life, from invoices to child-rearing, that he did not discuss with Ulla. That was twelve years ago, long before Kristina. When he was about Kristina's age.

He went back in to the office to stop himself offering her a lift. Because he wanted to go home by himself. He wanted to shower, put on some music, cook slowly, without talking. Spend a little time alone with Kristina.

*

Kristina said: ‘Why tonight?' George was ringing her from the car on his way home.

‘Why not?'

‘Jerzy is coming, don't you remember?'

‘They might like each other.' At least he wouldn't be alone with Ulla and Kristina.

‘They might
not.
'

‘Ulla really held the fort, you know. For all those months.'

‘Well, you're the cook,' Kristina said. ‘You can ask who you want.'

He'd noticed that Kristina was very sensitive to any reference to last winter. It always softened her, she immediately gave way. He tried not to take advantage of this. He should have rung earlier, but he didn't want Ulla to hear him deal with Kristina's prevarications. She would consider that he was asking Kristina's permission. Even if he shut the office door Ulla had the knack of barging in at the wrong moment. She doesn't even knock, Kristina said. Sometimes he caught himself believing that Ulla read his thoughts.

He turned off the highway onto the ocean road. The black shore was crusted with swimmers, the sky above the horizon was watermelon red. He was playing Theodorakis's
Canto General
and ought to have been uplifted – the summer night, the sensual people, the heroic landscape … The triumph of survival. What had he thought he'd learnt from his ordeal? Life was becoming the same old dutiful, half-hearted scramble. Already he'd forgotten what he'd been so certain about. And with it the old question resurfaced: Why? Why me? Medical opinion shrugged its shoulders, but he couldn't help recalling his old suspicion that in his life there was some chronic underlying lie.

*

Kristina said that she would only come to live with him and Grace if she had a space of her own. The house was very small, a two-bedroomed worker's cottage, one of eight identical houses all joined up in a row. So he converted the old shed at the back fence into a studio for her. It would be a place where she could draw – she liked botanical drawing – or study or simply be by herself. She made it clear that she wasn't going to make any concessions to family life. She had a horror of doing what she didn't want to. But when she started her research at the hospital, she worked so hard that most nights she fell asleep in front of the television and on the weekends she napped and read the newspapers. She lived like the daughter of the house, while Grace had always acted like a little wife.

In the end Kristina never used the studio. They started to dump broken chairs there, old bike helmets, collections of
Gramophone
going back ten years, things they no longer needed but were too lazy to throw out. Last winter George cleared himself a path from the door to the desk. It became the place where he went to focus, to attempt to still his mind. He'd been trying to practise this every evening after work.

Something in the room's damp smell and shadowy light seemed to be waiting for him when he opened the door. He sat down, positioned himself. He closed his eyes and saw himself straight-backed at the desk under the window. Beyond the window was the courtyard, the last in the row of courtyards that ran up the street to Monument Hill. He breathed in deeply, and out. He soared above the palm trees and the War Memorial, circled the rising sun of the giant AIF badge …

The kitchen flywire door slammed. He opened his eyes. Kristina came into the courtyard. She stood with one hand cradling the elbow of the other, which held a cigarette. Two crows were sitting among the sticky leaves of the fig tree. Normally she would have paid them a little scientific attention, but tonight she just kept staring into the twilight. If she were happy she wouldn't be smoking. She kept a packet of Drum for emergencies in a tin on the kitchen shelf.

He might as well give up now. His meditation sessions became shorter every day. Although she refused to look at the studio, something about the way she stood seemed like an appeal. Besides he couldn't stop watching her. He loved the look of her standing in the greenish light, her shoulders high with tension, her hair pinned up for the heat, her vulnerable collarbones, her shining narrow arms. Whenever he saw her he had a feeling of wellbeing.

*

She wasn't going to tell him about it. In the kitchen he poured a small glass of white wine for them both and put on Ella Fitzgerald. As he prepared to cook he discovered they were nearly out of olive oil. At once Kristina snatched up the car keys and said she felt like a drive. Surely it wasn't the prospect of Ulla that was upsetting her so much? He looked into her face. He'd noticed recently that she looked older. Her long eyes had become more deep-set, as if she'd gone further inside her own head. There were frown lines in the fine weave of her forehead. These past six months had been as hard on her as on him. He thought these signs of care ennobled her. Besides, he liked to think that she was catching up with him, that their age difference wouldn't be so marked. He heard the car roar off up the street. She was in the grip of something. He knew how easily she became obsessed. She might park by the ocean for a while, or at the Monument and look down over the city.

*

‘Where's the mobile?' Grace had come into the kitchen in her red silk kimono, her hair in a towel. ‘Can I borrow it tonight?' Wafts of flower scents followed her from the shower. He could hear the thud of House music coming from her room.

‘In the car. Kristina has taken it.'

Grace came to his elbow at the chopping board. He braced himself, a reflex action. Once she would have said something like: ‘I see. And left you to do the cooking. Typical.' She would have used this moment alone with him to warn him that Kristina was selfish and he didn't see it. That she wasn't to be trusted and would let him down one day. But Grace was altogether gentler since she returned from South America. She had left her father in Kristina's care and Kristina had proved her colours. Like a miracle, like sun after rain, there was peace at last in his household.

Grace puzzled up her beautiful plucked eyebrows at George. ‘What do you think this means? Denny had a dream last night that he was being unfaithful to me and he was
devastated
.'

‘He's afraid of losing you.'

‘Why?'

‘He's fallen in love with you.'

She half-laughed, pleased. ‘Wasn't he before, in the beginning?'

‘That was only the beginning.'

*

It was so long since they'd had guests that George and Kristina were shy and out of practice. Suddenly their small, hot rooms seemed cluttered, on display. They bumped into each other in the hallway as they each rushed to answer the door. In the doorway Jerzy's eyes flicked over George, to make his own prognosis. He'd just come back from long-service leave, six months travelling the world. All winter long his sardonic postcards, ignorant of George's drama, had dropped through the door.
Travelling is like death
, he'd written,
you see your old
life with new affection
… Now he surprised George with a bear hug, hampered by an armful of beer.