What the Light Hides (4 page)

A dog starts yapping on the other side of the fence, but stops as abruptly as it started. I check my watch. I am just on time. I sit down on the doorstep and inhale the air. Jasmine. This is how Sydney smells in August. I had forgotten.

I stand up a few minutes later when I hear someone at the gate.

‘Hi,' says a woman, pulling the gate shut behind her. She has bright red hair, and is out of breath. ‘I'm Pat. I'm so sorry for keeping you.'

She looks like a movie star from the fifties in her polka-dot skirt and short white fur coat. Underneath the coat she wears a black AC/DC T-shirt. I like her straight away.

‘I'm not usually late.' She searches through her bag and pulls out a set of keys. ‘But my daughter was sick at kindergarten and I had to pick her up.'

‘Where is she?'

‘Who?' She turns sideways and looks at me as she unlocks the door.

‘Your daughter?'

‘Oh,' Pat walks inside and reaches for the light switch. ‘She's with a friend watching
Spider-Man
. She's probably eating something full of sugar as we speak.'

I follow her inside.

Pat draws the curtains and light falls onto a clean living space with an adjoining kitchenette. ‘Do you have any kids?'

‘No,' I say.

A worn lounge sits along the wall. Above it hangs a framed Kandinsky poster. It's one of his depictions of Moscow and I have a sudden painful memory of Vera, gloved hands and red cheeks, at Red Square during our honeymoon.

‘That's probably a good thing,' says Pat. ‘People with kids often decide to leave early.' She turns towards me. ‘Neil says you're here to work on some designs. Woodwork?'

‘Yes,' I say.

The kitchenette looks basic, but clean. An old percolator sits on the kitchen bench.

Pat follows my gaze. ‘We call him Perkie. There's a stack of good coffee in the freezer, all for your consumption.'

I put my bag down.

She walks over and opens the fridge. ‘Sorry, I just need to check that everything is in order. Our previous resident left yesterday and we had a cleaner in last night.' She moves on to the cupboards, peering into them one at a time. ‘So you're Neil's little brother?'

‘Only by a year,' I say. ‘But he's quick to point it out.'

She laughs. ‘Neil is such a charmer. If I were one of his students I would totally fall in love with him.' She checks the cupboard under the sink. ‘The workshop is in there, by the way,' she points to the door on my right. ‘Have a look.'

I walk into a white-walled workshop with skylights. It has a good-sized work table and a bench perfect for the bandsaw. At the back of the room there is a metal sink and an empty bookshelf.

‘Is it going to work for you?' Pat calls out.

‘It's perfect,' I say.

She appears in the doorway. ‘Then I'll just show you the upstairs and leave you to it.'

I follow Pat through a door next to the kitchenette and up a set of stairs.

The room faces onto a leafy lane and the back of a small church. It has slanted walls and features a made-up double bed and a desk next to a blue-curtained window. It resembles something between a scout's cabin and a cheap hotel room, but it's clean and has an adjoining bathroom.

‘So this is it.' Pat puts her hands on her hips. ‘I sometimes come to do some admin, but just close the door to the stairs if you want privacy. I'm quiet when I'm here.' She hands me her card and a set of keys. ‘Ring if you have any questions. I live around the corner. My address is on the card.'

The scent of her perfume sits like an itch in the air after she's gone.

I open the window and inhale. The aroma is familiar. It's the smell of people, pleasant and insistent: washing detergent, fuel, garbage bins and a whiff of something spicy frying that makes my stomach growl. I walk back downstairs and unload the ute quickly before walking up to King Street.

People eat at tables outdoors despite the cold. A woman in Doc Martens and a purple shawl drinks tea outside an Indian diner with a scruffy-looking dog sprawled on her lap.

There is movement and colour everywhere I look. King Street attracts artists, students and people living on the streets, and I am met with voices, beards, tattoos, swearwords, hats, skirts, chains, piercings and men begging on the sidewalk.

I decide on the Indian diner and order lamb curry and a lassi so yellow that it seems to emanate light. From the window seat I gaze at the street. Newtown looks different from when I used to live here, but it feels the same.

I rented a room above a butcher's shop after I left uni. It was a dump. The toilet was downstairs and I shared it with the butcher and his two apprentices. They left bloody handprints on the sink and never cleaned. I would wash in the tiny kitchen upstairs or at the local swimming pool if I had money. The place was freezing in winter and suffocating in summer, but the lease allowed me to use the back shed for my woodwork and for that alone it was worth it.

By then my mother was already famous. Her book
Exterior Politics
had become an international bestseller and students flocked to hear her speak.

I brought Vera to one of her lectures. It was held in the quadrangle at Sydney Uni and the hall was packed. Vera and I squeezed in at the back next to the open window and then my mother made her entrance, rushing in with a briefcase under her arm. She didn't know we were there and didn't see us. Applause broke out, brief but enthusiastic.

‘Oh,' she said as she reached the front, ‘you are being entirely silly and adorable.' And then she put on her reading glasses and began the lecture. I didn't hear a word of what she was saying. I just kept thinking that I too would have clapped had I not known her. There had always been a kind of heat emanating from her. People responded to it, and that day was no exception; that day she made everyone feel that Political Science 101 was a gateway to a brilliantly inspired life.

When the lecture finished the guy next to me said, ‘Man, I always feel like I can fly after hearing Bessie speak.'

‘Bessie?'

‘That's what I call her in my mind,' he said and smiled a crooked smile.

After the lecture I introduced Vera to my mother, who multitasked perfectly. She handed out papers, gave someone a hug, nodded seriously at someone else's comment and still managed to ask Vera all the right questions. What did she like about art school? Who was her favourite sculptor? And she had looked amused when Vera and I joked about the inescapable heat in my room and how we had tried to haul an old bathtub up the stairs. The endeavour had been unsuccessful, the tub too large for the bend in the staircase, and we had ended up bruised and exhausted from our efforts.

‘So what do you think of the famous Beatrice Oliver?' I asked, as we walked home.

Vera looked at me sideways. ‘She doesn't like you very much,' she said.

Her words hurt me even though they were true.

I shrugged. ‘My brother and I don't inspire her. She finds it hard to deal with our mediocrity.'

‘What?'

‘That's what she once told us.'

Vera was quiet for a moment then said, ‘Darling?'

‘I know what you're going to say.'

‘No,' she said, ‘I don't think you do.'

‘You're going to say that my mother is a total idiot and that I am far from mediocre.'

She laughed. ‘That's true, but I'm not going to waste my time talking about her. I was going to ask you out for ice cream.'

Then, as always, the exception to the rule. Not long after our visit to Sydney Uni my mother turned up at my doorstep unannounced, carrying a heavy roll of black material.

She pinned the material to the top of the windowpane standing on my only chair while I scrambled through the cupboards in pursuit of a near-empty jar of Nescafé. Filling the kettle I protested, ‘It will make it even hotter in here.'

‘If the sun doesn't come in, the heat will stay out,' she said, snipping off black material, making it fit the frame.

It proved right. I lived in cool darkness during the day and at night I pulled the curtains aside to let the air in. My dreams were filled with traffic and drunken yelling and my limbs were iridescent and strange looking in the light from the street. One night I woke and caught sight of my foot and in the time it took for me to wake fully I watched it with horror, trying to work out what was moving at the end of my bed.

The material was an aberration; one of the few loving things my mother had done for me. And when winter came I couldn't bring myself to take it down. Besides, it seemed in reverse to keep the place warm. I kept it drawn all the time until Vera woke one morning laughing. ‘I can't see a thing,' she said, and then, pretending to be blind, she patted my face, and said, ‘You have a wonderful face, young man.'

The spices bring tears to my eyes. The curry is good and I wonder if Ben has eaten here. Chances are that he has. He and Vera are adventurous when it comes to food, adept with chopsticks and connoisseurs of all cuisines. We used to take Ben out whenever we came to the city. We let him choose the place. Often it was Japanese and very expensive.

On one of those occasions we had just picked him up from the airport. He had spent a month in India working on a sanitation project in the desert of Rajasthan. Both Vera and I were surprised when he chose engineering. It had seemed too conservative somehow for his restless idealism. But through his involvement with Engineers Without Borders it had all started to make sense. During dinner he talked about sustainable development and the power of humanitarian engineering with the fervour of a religious fanatic.

‘What's new?' Ben had asked me, reaching for a plate with sashimi and glistening roe.

He sat beside Vera, tanned and lanky, wearing a black shirt.

‘What's new?' I repeated, preparing myself for what was coming.

‘Sold any tables lately?'

‘You don't want to hear about my tables,' I said.

‘Ben,' Vera said and put a hand on his. ‘You've just come home. Let's enjoy this meal without arguing.'

That stopped him momentarily. ‘Grandma visited,' he said.

‘Visited?' said Vera.

‘She came to Jaipur,' he said, picking up a piece of salmon.

Vera looked sideways at me.

‘Really?' I said.

Vera poured each of us a glass of warm sake. ‘Was it something you had arranged?'

‘No, but she was on her way to Europe and made a stopover. They all thought she was really cool.' Ben got his phone out and showed us a picture: my mother in a dark blue sari next to Ben, both beaming at the camera.

‘Your grandmother is full of surprises,' I said. But I wasn't really that surprised. My mother pulled stunts for Ben's love. She loved him in a way she never had Neil or me.

‘Did you know,' Ben continued, ‘that a whole family in India could live ten years on what one of your tables sells for?'

‘Ben,' Vera said.

‘It's a table, Mum,' he said. ‘I'm just saying. Why does it have to be beautiful? Why should people have to pay so much?'

I tried to defend myself even though I knew it was futile. ‘Design and art are always worthwhile. Beauty is something that enriches every culture.' I knew I sounded pompous.

‘Marx said that art was a commodity of the capitalist system,' he countered. ‘There is no such thing as beauty outside a cultural definition.' He looked up and winked at the waitress, who in turn blushed so hard she looked like she had run a hundred-metre sprint.

Once again I resented the time Ben spent with my family, but the ample supply of Marxist arguments was Neil's fault, not my mother's. Ben seemed to spend countless hours in Neil's tiny office at Sydney Uni discussing politics.

Ben turned to me. ‘Build something that will help people, man.' And then his mood shifted the way it so often did and his eyes flooded. ‘That should be the most important thing.'

‘Enough.' Vera picked up a piece of plum-coloured sashimi on her chopsticks and offered it to Ben.

‘Mum, the eternal rescuer,' he said, opening his mouth.

‘Good?' she asked as he chewed.

‘Awesome,' he said and gazed at the waitress again.

‘He thinks I am sacrificial.' Vera joked and reached for my hand across the table.

‘Aren't you?' said Ben.

She swivelled on her stool and looked at him. I knew that look. It was Vera baring herself, showing that something had hurt her.

He looked at her for a moment, then said, ‘Sorry.'

She reached over and ruffled his hair. ‘Do you want to taste the shrimp?'

It's lunchtime and the Indian diner is filling up. The room echoes with voices. Two men in their seventies sit down at the table next to me. They get out a chessboard as they wait for their meal. One of them looks over at me and taps his hat. I realise he sees me as a fellow elderly citizen and feel like saying, ‘I'm only fifty, for goodness sake.'

I finish my meal and consider stopping by Ben's flat on my way back, but push the thought aside. I am not ready to think about packing up his things just yet. Instead I visit the supermarket and buy bread, butter, cheese, milk and a bag of green apples before heading back.

I take the plane to a piece of rosewood, and then spray it with water in order to see the grain more clearly. It stands out like a drawing. It looks like a man staring out to sea. Turned on its side it could be an aeroplane zooming into a storm. It's too beautiful, too distinct, and even though I am not sure what I want to make yet I am suddenly certain that neither the oak nor the rosewood is right for the project.

I use all my strength to lift the log of spotted gum onto the bench and then I make a diagonal cut. The log opens up. The heartwood is a dark chocolate with a distinctive thin grain and the sapwood very pale. It's almost the same colour as the small ironbark chest I made for Vera not long after we met. I gave it to her knowing that the gift had weight to it; a weight that went beyond what had been said between us thus far. I felt nervous watching her unwrap it on my workbench, but when the wrapping paper fell to the floor she looked at me and said, ‘David, this is beautiful. I couldn't have imagined anything like it, but now I don't want to ever be without it.'