It was only cordial, said Darcy.
The girl ignored him at first, reached into the back seat and pulled Darcy’s picnic blanket through, wrapped herself inside it like a big woollen scarf. My mother says he’s a bastard anyway, she said. She glared out from the blanket, and even though she’d just arrived she made Darcy feel disloyal.
He got out and went to the Vauxhall, picked up the grocery bag his mother had abandoned, along with her mohair picnic blanket, brought them back to the Austin. He tore the silver top of the milk bottle free and passed the bottle to the girl, then he ripped open the ginger nut biscuits.
Another episode of shrieking from the side of the house. What do you do here? asked the girl.
Sometimes I drive, said Darcy nonchalantly. He now let off the parking brake and they rolled a few centimetres. I don’t have a licence for night-time, he added.
The girl looked over at him like he was an idiot and it made him feel young. The fact was, since the day he ran into the ti-trees on Baden Powell Drive he’d been banned from driving. Since the day he met the missionary.
He peeled a mandarin, threw the pith out the window, and handed a decent section to the girl. As she ate it, she leaned against the door and closed her eyes and Darcy wished he hadn’t said the thing about the licence. Outside the daylight was fading, the silhouette of his father on the phone through the living-room window, making his calls.
She’ll be back, said the girl, her eyes opening for a second, but they glistened in the dark and Darcy knew Aunt Merran was gone. He slipped between the seats to the back and lay down, covered himself with the mohair, listened to the girl in the front, her occasional whimpers, his mother’s sporadic shouts, a bottle smashed against the incinerator. He knew everything would be different this time, for everyone, not just for him. The missionary was his secret and he held it close, but this girl was his father’s. Darcy was glad to be near her but he guessed she wouldn’t be here for long—he knew his mother, and he knew secrets were best when they were secret.
He woke to the rustle of the flowering gums, the scent of the eucalypts, his father opening the passenger door. Fin, his father said softly, but the girl was still sleeping. The sound of her nickname made Darcy want to say it too, but his father lifted her, still blanketed, out into the morning and Darcy sensed she was already being taken away. His mother in the sitting-room window glowering, guarding the house now, eyes on the girl called Fin.
The girl struggled awake, ripped herself free like she shouldn’t be touched. What are you doing? she asked Darcy’s father as he put her down. He never did anything right.
I got you in at Toorak College, he said. As a boarder. I’m taking you. He guided her gently into the kombi.
Darcy grabbed her knapsack from the front seat and followed, handed it up to her. She glared down at Darcy as he closed the door, and then the kombi was rattling down the drive.
Ulitsa Kazakov
Late Sunday
The Moscow night was still and quiet save for a TV somewhere. No neighbours talking nor any sign of the woman through the uncurtained glass across the way, just silent flurries of snow. A black phone that wasn’t connected. He sorted through Fin’s tapes—Joy Division, Boomtown Rats—flipped on the portable tape deck and lay on her bed in his underpants listening to the Divinyls’ ‘Boys in Town’. The ceiling above him stained and peeling, pasted with roses and butterflies, and pictures from Soviet magazines. Antiquated blenders and appliances, dresses and hairdos. The raspy verse that ended with a plea to get me out of here. He tried not to believe in signs but the words had him wishing he still had his passport strapped against him.
There was no evidence of what she’d been commissioned to paint. Books lined a shelf in the headboard: The Wretched of the Earth, The Soviet Achievement, Nagorno-Karabakh and Other Nationalities. He picked out Lenin’s What is to Be Done? Phrases underlined: The task of our Social Democracy is to subvert spontaneity. That didn’t sound like the Fin he knew. Maybe she had become a commo instead of just being left wing and chic. No wonder she’d lost her sense of humour. He flipped the pages. Only those devoid of principle are capable of change. Maybe that made sense; he wasn’t sure.
He nuzzled the familiar slightly stale bed-smell, smoky sheets that hadn’t been washed for his arrival. He reached for a narrow volume called The Meaning of Love by Vladimir Solovyov, a philosopher he’d never heard of. It had a chapter entitled ‘Love in humans is not akin to propagation’. A possible vindication, he thought. He nestled his hand under the elastic of his boxers and conjured the soldier at the railway station in Prague, the falseness of that as intimacy, rutting hurried as primitives, then the euphoric recall of his recent visit to Sydney for New Year’s Eve stole over him.
He never even saw the Harbour Bridge illuminated with fireworks or homing pigeons released from the wings of the Opera House. The alternative had slipped over him as easy as skin. The car almost drove itself to Centennial Park, the paradise of his despair. Men marauded there in silent ritual, triceps tattooed, the shadows of a chain-link fence. Down in the Brambles there was Kleenex in the dirt. He skirted the edges like a fringe-dweller, the way he’d done before, following a man with clamps on his nipples, thin as a snake with arms. Darcy hadn’t seen the new virus up close. He imagined it twisting through veins as he watched the young man suction liquid with an eyedropper from a small brown bottle, squirt it into his mouth, then offer Darcy a sample. Darcy accepted with a cautious insatiability, as if to celebrate the end of life as he’d known it. A taste like wheat in his teeth, infusing him and making the darkness seem light. He thought of his mother, drunk and alone in Mount Eliza, watching the living-room clock as the New Year struck, looking for Darcy in the crowd on TV, but she’d lost him this time.
As the fireworks lit up the distant midnight, it was the dawn of 1984, the Orwellian era, but not as he’d expected. The poofterbashers came through the trees like fluid, with Clockwork Orange nightsticks, and Darcy glimpsed his thin sick friend folded up in the paspalum, being beaten. Darcy ran blind through the park in a sort of paranoid fulfilment, strung on a line like a dress in the wind, there but far away. Even as he was escaping, tearing through branches in the dark, he knew if he stayed in Sydney he’d be back there again. Like a dog that returns to its vomit.
Darcy woke with a start to bolts being opened, Fin’s peasant dresses hanging above him and the radio turned up in the other room. She came in and switched off the bedroom light. Jesus, he said, you scared me.
Sorry. She lit a candle on the ledge beside the bed. Darcy looked at his watch; she’d been gone an hour.
Did you find food in the fridge? she asked. The candlelight wavered a shape on the wall as she took off her coat and clothes, went into the bathroom.
I was too tired to look.
The hushed sound of her peeing, brushing her teeth, cleaning off her make-up. She emerged without lipstick or eye shadow, slightly older-looking but lovely, ready for bed.
How did it go? he asked.
I’ll tell you about it in the morning. She lay on the bed and kissed him gently on the mouth. I hope I didn’t seem angry at the station, she said. I was just worried. I’ll get your passport back.
You should have told me if I was carrying something, he said.
She put her finger to his lips this time. I know. She turned her back to him, the nape of her neck pale where her hair had once covered it. He touched a small tattoo at the knobbly top of her spine: a red swallow, its wings spread and flying upwards. A sailor’s tattoo. She blew out the candle and moved closer to him in the dark. He traced the tattoo’s shape with his finger, the curve of the wings. If he’d ever wanted to be with a woman it would have been her. The apple shampoo scent in her hair, the muted whistle with each of her breaths reminded him of things. He hugged her gently from behind, his arm draped over her ribs.