Dan hesitated. He wanted to say that he’d learned to read in gaol, to really read. He wanted to tell her that the library had been his favourite place inside, that when he read As I Lay Dying he’d found a voice that made sense of time and space as he was experiencing it in gaol, that it had spoken to him more clearly and more profoundly than any voice he’d ever encountered before: of how the past could not be separated from memory, of how it was not only time that changed people, it was memory as well. He wished he could tell her how he’d read Johnno in one sitting at the library table and that he’d started it again before lights out that night. He wished he could tell her about discovering words and how words could become song, something he had never understood at school. Not that he had ever scoffed at books; his parents would never have tolerated that — even his father’s suspicion of the learned had never extended to learning itself, he loved stories too much. But the young Danny had never worked out how to make time for books; he had believed that the dedication required would pull him away from routine and from his body, from his goal of success. In prison, however, where everything was ordered by time, but time itself was always elusive, out of reach, he realised that he had been wrong about books.
Sitting at a desk in the library, reading in his cell, losing himself in a dog-eared copy of 1984, his whole being had been immersed in the ferocious lust for escape that drove Winston Smith. The novel had so shaken him that he’d had to gasp for air, as if he had swum an ocean. Desire and betrayaclass="underline" George Orwell had chronicled Dan’s soul. Soon after, he had picked up a slim volume from a donated crate of books, a collection of Chekhov’s short stories, the spine broken, some of the pages falling loose. Dan had never read a short story before in his life. One particular story he had returned to again and again, reading it obsessively: ‘A Day in the Country’, the story of an innocent Russian peasant world that could not possibly be part of the same universe that had created the brutal shaming world of prison. Dan couldn’t understand how he had become the peasant boy Danilka, how he knew how the boy moved and breathed, how he could feel the soreness of Danilka’s wrist when the old cobbler had freed it from the hole in the tree, how as he read of the journey through the fields and back to the village he could smell the scent of bird cherry, meadowsweet, and lilies-of-the-valley after the storm. He had reread it immediately, and realised that he had been wrong; that as the old man had crept into the deserted barn to make the sign of the cross over the sleeping orphans, Chekhov had indeed captured some of the brutality as well as the tenderness of the world. Dan had furtively torn the pages of the story out of the book — no one would know that they had ever been there, the book was old and that torn, no one would ever know — and he had guarded that story through his last few months in prison, kept it folded inside a tear in his mattress. That story had returned him to childhood, had made him shudder with a joy so intense it seemed almost erotic. Had he ever known such joy?
Dan had discovered that he had been mistaken, that books did not exist outside of the body and only in mind, but that words were breath, that they were experienced and understood through the inseparability of mind and body, that words were the water and reading was swimming. Just as he had in water, he could lose himself in reading: mind and body became one. He had taken the Chekhov story with him on release, and the pages remained folded in a tight square in the one gift Carlo had ever given him, an old vinyl pouch in which the older man had kept his tobacco and his drugs. The pouch now sat on a makeshift shelf Dan had constructed next to the mattress in his bedroom. That story was a song: in reading it he believed he was opening his lungs and singing.
He didn’t know how to explain all of this to his mother, but at that moment, with the books tucked under his arm, he decided that when they were back in Melbourne he would show her his home, in which there was no television or radio, no stereo or computer, just books. And he would tell her that prison had taught him that books were all he needed, books were enough. They were music and light and sound to him — they were the world.
‘I like reading,’ he answered simply, and held out his hand for the keys. ‘My turn to drive.’
They hadn’t driven far, listening to a live recording of Aretha Franklin backed by a gospel choir, when his mother lowered the volume. ‘It was Regan who was always the reader,’ she announced, suddenly. Her tone shifted. ‘Have you heard from her?’ There was pleading in her voice.
‘No,’ he said, and remembered with mortification his brother’s scoffing words. ‘Have you?’
His mother didn’t answer straight away. She had her eyes closed, was swaying to the music. ‘She speaks to your father. He’s visited her when he’s been up north. We want her to go back to school, finish her VCE, but she won’t hear of it.’
The call and response of singer and congregation tumbled and rolled under his mother’s words.
Her voice trembled on the edge of tears. ‘I feel like I failed her, Danny. I did what my mother did to me. I took my daughter for granted. I don’t know why I did that.’
His gaze didn’t waver from the open road, the parched wheat-coloured farmland. His mother turned up the volume. Franklin’s ecstasy filled the car and Dan found that he could breathe out. It was safe again.
It was pitch-black night as they descended from the hills into Adelaide, only the weaving headlights breaking through the obstinate darkness. The descent had come abruptly, the drop sheer and frightening, the city’s canopy of sparkling lights suddenly glimmering below. Dan was tired and had to snap to attention, fearful with every turn that he could lose control and send the car flying out into the night. Part of him wanted that flight, that release.
His mother had turned off the stereo; they were descending into silence.
‘I’m scared, Danny,’ she said.
‘Sorry, I’ll slow down.’
‘No, not of your driving. I’m scared of going home.’
Home. It surprised him that she would still use that word for this city. ‘Maybe Dad should have come with you instead?’
She shook her head vehemently. Dan was concentrating on the precarious twists and turns of the road but he sneaked a look across at her. No make-up, streaks of ash now in her once coal-black hair, which was tied back in a severe roll. She was wearing a corn-yellow cardigan over a white top, loose dark linen pants. No intricately embroidered stockings, no heels on her shoes. This was not the mother he knew, the woman who delighted in artifice, in elaborate dress, in exhilarating aromas. She had stripped herself down to a woman on the other side of middle age.
‘Your dad came last time,’ she finally explained. ‘It was a disaster. Your papou was dying, he was so sick but he still found it in himself to rise from his deathbed and order your father and me out of the house.’ Again, she was shaking her head ferociously, as if by doing so she could shake her memories loose, untether them and toss them away. ‘He called me the most terrible names — it was awful. I thought your father was going to punch him.’
She touched her son’s wrist, the lightest touch, then put her hand back in her lap. ‘I really appreciate this, Danny. I need you here but I’m sorry to put you through this.’
His neck hurt, he felt bone-weary from the driving and her words. A dull pain was thumping at the back of his head. He couldn’t fail her, he must not fail her.
‘You don’t have to thank me, Mum. I’m glad I came.’
He had no sense of the city as they drove into it, his mother giving directions, but she ended up getting them lost, and they had to stop at a late-night service station to ask the way. At last they turned into a dark cul-de-sac and his mum told him to park outside a box-like dark-brick house with a tiny neat lawn. There was no fence; the yellowing grass came down to the footpath. Dan grabbed his backpack and his mother’s suitcase from the boot and they walked up the drive and rang the doorbell. As they waited he was conscious of his mother’s agitation, then there were footsteps approaching. The door was flung open by a plump young woman with lively, thickly lashed eyes, dyed-blonde hair and enormous gold-hooped earrings.