Karen’s friend said, ‘That’s funny.’ Her square-cut nail tapped a tiny picture on the blue wall above the dark heads: a minute Sacred Heart. ‘It doesn’t seem right, does it?’
‘What doesn’t?’
‘Well, the whole Christian thing-it’s not like it belongs in India.’
The memory of this woman’s living room, in which a long-lobed Buddha reclined on a mantelpiece and frankincense smouldered beneath a portrait of the Dalai Lama, fl oated through Tom’s mind. He let it pass. Evidence of the subcontinent’s age-old traffic with the West rarely found favour with Westerners. To be eclectic was a Western privilege, as was the authentication of cultural artefacts. The real India was the flutter of a sari, a perfumed dish, a skull-chained goddess. Difference, readily identified, was easily corralled. Likeness was more subtly unnerving.
Tom Loxley, drinking whisky on his bed, wished to lead a modern life. By which he meant a life that was free to be trivial, that had filtered out the dull sediment of tradition and inherited responsibilities; a life shiny as invention, that fl oated and gleamed.
In that respect he was an exemplary Australian.
His cousin’s blue walls contained a life Tom might have led.
He saw himself waiting on a red settee to be rescued; with no real expectation that rescue would come.
Recently, there were more and more South Asian faces in Australia. Each time he saw one, Tom felt a small surge of satisfaction. At the same time, he would think, But there are so many more waiting.
Whenever he thought of the waiting going on around the globe, Tom was afraid. He feared that the ground of his life would give way; that he would fall into a room where, powerless as a figurine, he would have nothing to do but wait. Transformed into a human commodity, he would fi nd himself competing with thousands of identical products, all waiting to be chosen. It was an irrational, potent dread. It had visited Tom, assuming one shape, now another, for years. It whispered of the life led by millions, a phantom life characterised by stasis and the dull absence of hope; an unmodern life, where the best that could be expected of the future was that it be no worse than the past.
Of late, its mutter had grown louder. Tom knew that this crescendo was bound up with his mother. As Iris’s body failed, he felt her claim on him grow forceful. He felt the proximity of history. The present makes use of what has gone before, feeding on and transforming it, and rejecting what remains. But Tom could remember the aromatic streets of his childhood, where faeces, animal and human, lingered on display. The past waited too: odorous, unhygienic, surplus; refusing to be disposed of with decent haste.
Eileen and Cedric still lived on the black side of the canal, New Zealand having deemed superfluous such talents as they possessed.
But recently their son had won a scholarship to a mid-western college. Tom pictured him in a laboratory, calibrating instruments; on a sidewalk, astonished by snow.
Realism argued that the scholar would in time buy a Lexus and alter his idiom; would transfer money telegraphically, and put off lifting a phone to hear of a sister’s disappointments, a parent’s decline.
Yet it was apparent to Tom that people, like nations, grew stunted on a diet of realism alone. To soar it was necessary to imagine the transcendent case.
Arthur Loxley, pinkly moist in the tropics, spoke often of the cold. He described childhood winters: his eerie morning face in the basin’s ice mirror; a flaw that opened under his skates on a frozen pond and raced, a flame along a lit fuse, towards the shore.
It was talk that horrified his wife. As a bride, Iris’s great-grandmother had visited Lisbon in January. The sky was blue enamel, mosaic pavements sparkled in the sun. On her ninety-sixth birthday Henrietta de Souza was still reliving the deception she had experienced on drawing off a glove and holding out her hand to a slanted ray. ‘The sun was cold!’ the old lady declared in cracked, imperious tones, and thumped her stick on a tile painted with a spouting whale. ‘The sun was cold!’
That unnatural reversal worked powerfully on her Iris’s imagination. The European Winter: she pictured it as a beast.
It lay open-mawed across the jewelled cavern of London, daring her to pass. In Lawrence Fitch’s embrace, envisaging her English future as wavelets travelled from her thighs to her throat, she saw herself the plaything of icy paws; and shuddered, so that the captain, finding her name circulating with the port and himself the object of regimental envy, felt justified in referring to her as a ravishing little trollop.
When the earth cracked open in pre-monsoonal heat, Arthur evoked the geometric precision of snowfl akes. Fanning himself with a newspaper, he spoke of wind-whipped sleet, and the brown slush on Coventry pavements. He described the sensation of grasping iron chains in a frozen playground, and how to fashion a man from snow.
He held his son entranced with tales of icy queens, and wolves howling through black, leafless woods. There was a story about a ship manned by wraiths that might be glimpsed in Arctic latitudes, hoar-frost diamonds in its rigging. A bookseller’s warren yielded a musty yellow volume written by a Dane; and a five-year-old who had never known cold shed warm tears at the plight of a small girl freezing with her tray of matches.
Tom tilted a glass of whisky, the better to observe the melting of icebergs.
In time he had encountered theories of cultural identity and discovered that his childhood had been deficient in reading that reflected the world around him. The argument had its force; and was, like all orthodoxies, blind in one eye. It viewed Arthur’s stories as nostalgic exercises in the colonial project of ignoring what was indigenous and vital in favour of alien constructions.
Tom saw the thing as more intricate, and himself as happy to have experienced, when young, the empire of imagination. Stories with Indian backdrops offered the pleasure of recognition. Those that brought outlandish elements into play posed India as one reality among many.
It was precisely the disjunction between Arthur’s anecdotes and the scenes unfolding before his eyes that had fascinated Tom as a boy. He was stirred by a tale of alpine snows as a northern child might quicken to palm-fringed lagoons: each thrilling to wonders that existed beyond the rim of perception.
The most blatantly trumped-up tale captured Arthur’s sympathy, so that swindlers of every stripe sought him out with stories of widowed mothers or failsafe investments. A lean, ageless individual who went by the name of Perry once laid siege to him for a month with whisky and sagas of the Brazilian interior; at the end of which time Arthur agreed to relieve him of three uncut diamonds he claimed to have wrested at knifepoint from a dishonest garimpeiro. The contract had been sealed with a fresh bottle when Perry’s angry blue eyes filled with tears. ‘You have driven me to honesty,’ he announced, and blew his nose violently. He reached for the soft leather pouch containing the pebbles and flung it over his shoulder into a bed of shocking-pink anthuriums.
The incident made its way back to Iris, who placed herself in her husband’s path with her hands on her hips. ‘I told you about that Perry,’ she began, her voice ominously even. ‘As soon as I set eyes on him, large as life and twice as ugly, didn’t I tell you, Here is a humbug?’
It was true. Even Tom, then aged eight, had been struck by the unreliability of Perry: flagrant in every facet of the man, from his winking tiepin to his golden-cornered smile. Perry’s Pebbles: it became family shorthand for the preposterous; for a tale too good to be true.
Arthur had been dead a decade when an exchange occurred that cast the episode forever in a different light. Seeking to amuse a girl he was involved with, Tom had set about skewering a bombastic acquaintance.