“Right, mate,“ was the message, "let's get serious here. What about that wall?”
Those who were present to hear it, living as they did in structures no less flimsy than the one that was beginning to break up all around them, would feel a chill wind at their ear.
All this Jo had observed, with amusement and a growing curiosity, for several months before she found herself face to face with the master builder himself.
JO WAS THIRTY-FOUR and from the country, though no one would have called her a country girl. Before that she was from Hungary. Very animated and passionately involved in everything she did, very intolerant of those who did not, as she saw it, demand enough of life, she was a publisher's editor, ambitious or pushy according to how you took these things, and successful enough to have detractors. She herself wanted it all — everything. And more.
“You want too much,” her friends told her. “You can't have it, you just can't. Nobody can.”
“You just watch me,” Jo told them in reply.
She had had two serious affairs since coming to Sydney, both briefer than she would have wished. She was too intense, that's what her friends told her. The average bloke, the average Australian bloke — oh, here it comes, that again, she thought — was uncomfortable with dramatics. Intimidated. Put off.
“I don't want someone who's average,” she insisted. “Even an average Australian.”
She wanted a love that would be overwhelming, that would make a wind-blown leaf of her, a runaway wheel. She was quite prepared to suffer, if that was to be part of it. She would walk barefoot through the streets and howl if that's what love brought her to.
Her friends wrinkled their brows at these stagy extravagances. “Honestly! Jo!” Behind her back they patronised and pitied her.
In fact they too, some of them, had felt like this at one time or another. At the beginning. But had learned to hide their disappointment behind a show of hard-boiled mateyness. They knew the rules. Jo had not been around long enough for that. She had no sense of proportion. Did she even know that there were rules?
They met at last.At a party at Palm Beach, the usual informal Sunday-afternoon affair. She knew as soon as he walked in who it must be.
He was wearing khaki shorts, work boots, nothing fancy. An open-necked unironed shirt.
Drifting easily from group to group, noisily greeted with cries and little affectionate pecks on the cheek by the women, and with equally affectionate gestures from the men — a clasp of the shoulder, a hand laid for a moment on his arm — he unsettled the room, that's what she thought, re-focused its energies, though she accepted later that the unsettlement may only have been in herself. Through it all he struck her as being remote, untouchable, self-enclosed, though not at all self-regarding. Was it simply that he was shy? When he found her at last she had the advantage of knowing more about him, from the tales she had been regaled with, the houses she had been in, than he could have guessed.
What she was not prepared for was his extraordinary charm. Not his talk — there was hardly any of that. His charm was physical. It had to do with the sun-bleached, salt-bleached mess of his hair and the way he kept ploughing a rough hand through it; the grin that left deep lines in his cheeks; the intense presence, of which he himself seemed dismissive or unaware. He smelled of physical work, but also, she thought, of wood shavings — blond transparent curlings off the edge of a plane. Except that the special feature of his appeal was the rough rather than the smooth.
They went home together. To his place, to what he “The Shack,” a house on stilts, floating high above a jungle of tree ferns, morning glory, and red-clawed coral trees in a cove at Balmoral. Stepping into it she felt she had been there already. Here at last was the original of all those open-ended unfinished structures she had been in and out of for the past eight months. When she opened the door to the loo, she laughed. There was no glass in the window. Only a warmish square of night filled with ecstatic insect cries.
She was prepared for the raw, splintery side of him. The sun-cracked lips, the blonded hair that covered his forearms and the darker hair that came almost to his Adam's apple, the sandpapery hands with their scabs and festering nicks. What she could not have guessed at was the whiteness and almost feminine silkiness of his hidden parts. Or the old-fashioned delicacy with which he turned away every attempt on her part to pay tribute to them. It was so at odds with the libertarian mode she had got used to down here.
He took what he needed in a frank, uncomplicated way; was forceful but considerate — all this in appreciation of her own attractions. She was flattered, moved, and in the end felt a small glow of triumph at having so much pleased him. For a moment he entirely yielded, and she felt, in his sudden cry, and in the completeness afterwards with which he sank into her arms, that she had been allowed into a place that in every other circumstance he kept guarded, closed off.
She herself was dazzled. By a quality in him—beauty is what she said to herself — that took her breath away, a radiance that burned her lips, her fingertips, every point where their bodies made contact. But when she tried to express this — to touch him as he had touched her and reveal to him this vision she had of him — he resisted. What she felt in his almost angry shyness was a kind of distaste. She retreated, hurt, but was resentful too. It was unfair of him to exert so powerful an appeal and then turn maidenly when he got a response.
She should have seen then what cross-purposes they would be at, and not only in this matter of intimacy. But he recognised her hurt, and in a way, she would discover, that was typical of him, tried out of embarrassment to make amends.
He was sitting up with his back against the bedhead enjoying a smoke. Their eyes met, he grinned; a kind of ease was re-established between them. She was moved by how knocked about he was, the hard use to which he had put his body, the scraps and scrapes he had been through. Her fingertips went to a scar, a deep nick in his cheekbone under the left eye. She did not ask. Her touch was itself a question.
“Fight with an arc lamp,” he told her. His voice had a humorous edge. “I lost. Souvenir of my brief career as a movie star.”
She looked at him. The grin he wore was light, self-deprecatory He was offering her one of the few facts about himself — from his childhood, his youth — that she would ever hear. She would learn only later how useless it was to question him on such matters. You got nowhere by asking. If he did let something drop it was to distract you, while some larger situation that he did not want to develop slipped quietly away. But that was not the case on this occasion. They barely knew one another. He wanted, in all innocence, to offer her something of himself.
When he was thirteen — this is what he told her — he had been taken by his mother to an audition. More than a thousand kids had turned up. He didn't want the part, he thought it was silly, but he had got it anyway and for a minute back there, because of that one appearance, had been a household name, a star.
She had removed her hand and was staring.
“What?” he said, the grin fading. He gave her an uncomfortable look and leaned across to the night table to stub out his cigarette.
“I can't believe it,” she was saying. “I can't believe this. I know who you are. You're Skip Daley!”
“No I'm not,” he said, and laughed. “Don't be silly.”
He was alarmed at the way she had taken it. He had offered it as a kind of joke. One of the least important things he could have told her.
“But I saw that film! I saw it five times!”