“Don't,” he said. “It was nothing. I shouldn't have let on.”
But he could have no idea what it had meant to her. What he had meant to her.
Newly arrived in the country, a gangly ten-year-old, and hating everything about this place she had never wanted to come to — the parched backyards, the gravel playground under the pepper trees at her bare public school, the sing-song voices that mocked her accent and deliberately, comically got her name wrong — she had gone one Saturday afternoon to the local pictures and found herself tearfully defeated. In love. Not just with the hard-heeled freckle-faced boy up on the screen, with his round-headed, blond, pudding-bowl haircut and cheeky smile, his fierce sense of honour, the odd mixture in him of roughness and shy, broad-vowelled charm, but with the whole barefoot world he moved in, his dog Blue, his hardbitten parents who were in danger of losing their land, the one-storeyed sun-struck weatherboard they lived in, which was, in fact, just like her own.
More than a place, it was a world of feeling she had broken through to, and it could be hers now because he lived in it. She had given up her resistance.
On that hot Saturday afternoon, in that darkened picture theatre in Albury, her heart had melted. Australia had claimed and conquered her. She was shocked and the shock was physical. She had had no idea till then what beauty could do to you, the deep tears it could draw up; how it could take hold of you in the middle of the path and turn you round, fatefully, and set you in a new direction. That was what he could know nothing of.
All that time ago, he had changed her life. And here he was more than twenty years later, in the flesh, looking sideways at her in this unmade lump of a bed.
“Hey,” he was saying, and he put his hand out to lift aside a strand of her hair.
“I just can't get over it,” she said.
“Hey,” he said again. “Don't be silly! It was nothing. Something my mother got me into. It was all made up. That stupid kid wasn't me. I was a randy little bugger if you want to know. All I could think about was my dick—" and he laughed. “They didn't show any of that. Truth is, I didn't like myself much in those days. I was too unhappy.”
But he was only getting himself in deeper. Unhappy? He caught the look in her eyes, and to save the situation leaned forward and covered her mouth with his own.
From the start he famished her. It was not in her nature to pause at thresholds but there were bounds she could not cross and he was gently, firmly insistent. He did give himself, but when she too aggressively took the initiative, or crossed the line of what he thought of as a proper modesty, he would quietly turn away. What he was abashed by, she saw, was just what most consumed her, his beauty. He had done everything he could to abolish it. All those nicks and scars. The broken tooth he took no trouble to have fixed. The exposure to whatever would burn or coarsen.
A series of “spills” had left him, at one time or another, with a fractured collarbone, three bouts of concussion, a broken leg. These punishing assaults on himself were attempts to wipe out an affliction. But all they had done was refine it: bring out the metallic blue of his eyes, show up under the skin, with its network of cracks, the poignancy— that is how she saw it — of his bones.
Leaving him sprawled, that first morning, she had stepped out into the open living room.
Very aware that she was as yet only a casual visitor to his world, and careful of intruding, she picked her way between plates piled with old food and set on tabletops or pushed halfway under chairs, coffee mugs, beer cans, gym socks, ashtrays piled with butts, magazines, newspapers, unopened letters, shirts dropped just anywhere or tossed carelessly over the backs of chairs. A dead light bulb on a glass coffee-table rolled in the breeze.
She sat a moment on the edge of a lounge and thought she could hear the tinkling that came from the closed globe, a distant sound, magical and small, but magnified, like everything this morning. The room was itself all glass and light. It hung in mid-air. Neither inside nor out, it opened straight into the branches of a coral tree, all scarlet claws.
She went to the kitchen bench at the window. The sink was piled with coffee mugs and more dishes. She felt free to deal with those, and was still at the sink, watching a pair of rainbow lorikeets on the deck beyond, all his dinner plates gleaming in the rack, when he stepped up behind her in a pair of sagging jockey-shorts, still half asleep, rubbing his skull. He kissed her in a light, familiar way. Barely noticing the cleared sink — that was a good sign — he ran a glass of water and drank it off, his Adam's apple bobbing. Then kissed her again, grinned, and went out on to the deck.
The lorikeets flew off, but belonged here, and soon ventured back.
Over the weeks,as she came to spend more time there, she began to impose her own sort of order on the place. He did not object. He sat about reading the papers while she worked around him.
The drawers of the desk where he sometimes sat in the evening, wearing reading glasses while he did the accounts, were stuffed with papers — letters, cuttings, prospectuses. There were more papers pushed into cardboard boxes, in cupboards, stacked in corners, piled under beds.
“Do you want to keep any of this?” she would enquire from time to time, holding up a fistful of mail.
He barely looked. “No. Whatever it is. Just chuck it.”
“You sure?”
“Why? What is it?”
“Letters.”
“Sure. Chuck ‘em out.”
“What about these?”
“What are they?”
“Invoices. 1984.”
“No. Just pile ‘em up, I'll make a bonfire. Tomorrow maybe.”
She had a strong need for fantasy, she liked to make things interesting. In their early days together, she took to leaving little love notes for him. Once under the tea caddy, where he would come across it when he went out in the morning, just after six, to make their tea. On other occasions, beside his shaving gear in the bathroom, in one of the pockets of his windcheater, in his work shorts. If he read them he did not mention the fact. It was ages before he told her, in a quarrel, how much these love notes embarrassed him. She flushed scarlet, did not make that mistake again.
He had no sense of fantasy himself. He wasn't insensitive — she was often touched by his thoughtfulness and by the small things he noticed — but he was very straight-up-and-down, no frills. Once, when his film was showing, she asked if they could go and see it. “What for?” he asked, genuinely surprised. “It's crap. Anyway, I'd rather forget all that. It wasn't a good time, that. Not for me it wasn't.”
“Because you were unhappy?” she said. “You told me that, remember?”
But he shut off then, and the matter dropped.
He told her nothing about his past. Nothing significant. And if she asked, he shied away.
“I don't want to talk about it,” was all he'd say. “I try to forget about what's gone and done with. That's where we're different. You go on and on about it.”
No I don't, she wanted to argue. You're the one who's hung up on the past. That's why you won't talk about it. What I'm interested in is the present. But all of it. All the little incidental happenings that got you here, that got us here, made us the way we are. Seeing that she was still not satisfied, he drew her to him, almost violently — offering her that, his hard presence — and sighed, she did not know for what.
He had no decent clothes that she could discover. Shirts, shorts, jeans — workclothes, not much else. A single tie that he struggled into when he had an engagement that “official.” She tried to rectify this. But when he saw the pile of new things on the bed he looked uncomfortable. He took up a blue poplin shirt, fingered it, frowned, put it down.