Arthur laughed, for all roundnesses. He took out the marble and looked at it.
One year he went up to look at the wheel-tree, again in the season of its second flowering, and as though by contrivance, the Chinese woman was standing beneath it. Only the crackle of her surface more pronounced, her bones more obviously breakable. On this occasion she turned even quicker, and went somewhat angrily behind the sheds. Perhaps seeing him on his own, without the benefit of Mrs Poulter. Well, he expected that sort of thing. But the wheel-tree fairly sizzled with fire, burning its way back through time to the other afternoon.
He shivered remembering the feel of hair, skin smelling ever so faintly of struck flint.
Waldo said: “If ever I catch you hanging round that woman.”
He had not explained what he would do, but out of respect for Mrs Poulter, and to avoid any risk of her humiliation, Arthur did not see her again. That is, they no longer walked together along the unseen, the secret paths. For it was impossible to ignore the sight of Mrs Poulter, in this cardigan or that, pulling a weed, or wiping the pollard off her hands.
He developed the habit of calling out across her picket fence: “How are we, Mrs Poulter? Eh?”
And Mrs Poulter would reply: “Good, thanks, Mr Brown.”
Looking, rather, at the weeds.
“And Mr Poulter keeping good?”
“Good enough, thanks. Yes.”
Exploring the soil with the toe of her shoe.
They lived opposite each other for many years without a change in the recognized climate.
Then one evening he had gone in taking the two pounds of self-raising which Mrs Allwright said Mrs Poulter was enquiring for. He had barged right in the way it had been customary in their youth. Banging the gauze door. Had gone on into the house drunk with the scent of beeswax and overpowering cleanliness.
“Mrs Poulter?” he called. “Where are we?”
On that evening he was so happy.
In the empty, half-darkened house he had come across her, through the bedroom door, standing over against a chest. Doing something of a private nature. Mrs Poulter, he realized, was dressing, or undressing, an enormous doll.
“Go on!” he almost shouted. “Where did you get that beaut doll?”
He would have trampled farther into the bedroom, but saw he had caught her out cruelly in what she was doing. She stood there holding the naked doll against her bosom, half looking as though the plastic was turning molten in her arms and she wanted to shoot it out across the carpet.
“You’ve no right,” she began to stutter, “barging in. Into people’s houses. A lady’s bed — bedroom. They should of learnt you that, Mr Brown!”
“Okay,” he said, “Mrs Poulter.”
They might never have known each other. For he too was becoming a stranger, in the forbidden doorway, holding a packet of flour in his arms.
But she continued creating.
“Ugly thing!”
She flung the doll into a drawer, where it made the sound of a body thudding, and gave out a cry of mechanical anguish.
“Nobody,” she panted, “ever wants half of what they’re given!”
Crumpling into a ball the doll’s dress and knickers which, in her hurry, she had overlooked.
“Okay, Mrs Poulter,” Arthur said, “you can give it away to some kiddy.”
Then Mrs Poulter, who was standing by now in the centre of the room, said something, something surprising, still squeezing up the doll’s clothes.
“I wouldn’t contaminate any kiddy,” she said. “I mean, I’d encourage her to think most kiddies can expect better than dolls.”
And he could see the knots forming in Mrs Poulter’s throat, like a goitre. Age had made her fat and rather purple. He would have liked to comfort the stout woman.
Instead he said: “I brought the flour.”
“Thank you, Arthur,” she said coming forward, and leading the way into the kitchen.
“You ought to switch on the light,” he advised. “For company. That way you won’t get morbid.”
“It’s more economical to go without the light,” she said. “I’ll switch it on when Bill comes in and I give him his tea.”
By now Mrs Poulter was quite restored, and they stood together, just a moment, unconfessed, over the packet of flour. He was surprised how their hands had swollen since he had been forced to dance his mandala, on an afternoon flowing with fire.
Never again had he danced out of fullness, though sometimes on winter mornings, after the grass had been released, and the sunlight was dripping through the steel mesh of blackberry bushes, he would execute one or two movements. He would hang his head to one side, he would extend his herring-bone arms, the fingers dangling in bundles of thawed flesh, and the dogs would stop their licking to watch.
Never did any of them feel that these were amongst the inspired moments. He would go off home, followed neatly by the blue dogs.
In the beginning he had wondered how to fill the time. Of course there was the bread and milk they ate, and on Sundays the salmon-loaf habit which they had inherited from Mother. They ate mostly boiled stuff, because Waldo had ordained.
“Boiled food prevents ulcers,” he said, “and as much as anything else helps ensure longevity.”
And there was the butter-making besides, and bread. Arthur used to clean the lamps, an activity he associated with that of churning or baking, the outcome so lucid.
He wrote his poems too, on mornings full of sun and blue dogs scratching at their fleas. Though why he wrote, or for whom, he could not have told, nor would he have shown. But sat with the pencil, the paper on his knee. He wrote the poem of the daughter he had never had, and of the wives he carried inside him. The writing of the poems was the guiltiest act he had performed since starting to look up the dictionaries, to read the books, his mind venturing through the darkened theatre in which the gods had died in the beginning.
Until Waldo would stick his head out the window and shout: “Can’t you do something, Arthur? Haven’t you an occupation? Take those dogs for a walk at least. I can’t think for having you around.”
Poor Waldo, his neck stuck out like that of a hen about to be decapitated.
“Good God, Arthur,” he used to shout, “do I have to think for you as well?”
Poor Waldo, in spite of himself, called on God more often as time went on.
Thus dismissed, Arthur would shuffle off — it was all the same, and nothing could hurt — taking with him his papers, his dogs, and his mandalas. He would wander for hours.
He only first realized how old he was when he caught sight of his reflection nose-picking in Woolworths’ plate-glass window. He might have come home ashamed if he hadn’t remembered halfway down Terminus Road moments of other people’s shame: Mrs Poulter for her doll, his brother for his brother.
The night Arthur, dogs at heel, brought the flour to Mrs Poulter, Waldo was acting or celebrating something. The wreath of roses, the Banksian roses, made a frame for Waldo in the blue dress. If they had been less intimate, if Arthur had not experienced already some such translation in himself of his brother’s personality, then he might have suffered a greater shock, from Waldo’s white, plucked arms, and the shattering torrent of glass beads. Breathing alone stirred the beads. Or tilting of a chair. As Waldo squinted between the slats of his fan. Or stroked his bit of a raggedy moustache. All the family were gathered in the glass: Dad and Mother, Uncle Charlie, Cousin Mollie and “Adelaide”, all huddled in the darkened box, waiting to see, not only what might offer itself for killing, but how their own blood would run.