Those Brisbane Romantics, page 3
The camphor laurels in the front yard were sighing in the wind. She stood on the footpath, holding on to the points of the picket fence, peering at the house through a rain as soft as mist. Although it was one a.m. a light burned in the tower room, and violin music filtered through the trees. Joe was up.
Tara eased the gate open and slipped inside.
The dandelions were heavy headed and hung across the path. They clutched at her ankles as she approached the house. Folly, they said to her, what you are doing is folly. Outside the closed front door, flowers blown from the golden rain tree lay slaughtered and sodden on the flagstone patio.
Tara turned to the loquat tree and began to climb steadily with the ease of familiarity. Folly, the tree said to her, what you are about to do is folly. She kept on. When she reached the bough that ran on to the roof just below the tower’s north window, she took up her position in the fork of two branches. From there she had a clear view into the room.
The light from a bare bulb fell on Joe’s face as he stood before an old music stand practising the first movement of the Sibelius concerto. He wore old jeans, palest of blue from the boiling, knees torn and patched and torn again, and a white T-shirt, equally worn.
Tara walked across the bough on to the roof and tapped on the tower window.
That is where her problems really began.
They sat on the church steps in the dark.
“I knew you’d come,” he said.
Tara was silent. Behind them on the hill loomed the convent school they’d attended as children.
“It took you longer than I expected actually. Two weeks.”
Tara thought of the Hop with nostalgia. That night her position as Joe’s partner had lent her prestige; everyone listened when she spoke. A wild feeling of exultation had come over her that she could escape from her head for once and mingle with these people. And when she and Joe danced in the candlelight to Nat King Cole records, they danced well together, they fitted. “Who said you couldn’t dance?” he’d said, pulling her closer. “You’re terrific!”
Tara shut her eyes. That night Joe was big and warm, and she was happy. “Were you disappointed when you thought I wasn’t coming?”
He lit a cigarette. “I hoped you wouldn’t come at all.”
A memory flashed unbidden of the first time she’d seen Joe Gordon. She was barely three. In Sherwood Road was a house that had been divided into four flats during World War II. Before he joined up, Jack Mahoney had seen his family settled in the flat nearest the Gordons. One day as Joe was knocking a cricket ball around the yard pretending to be Don Bradman, she stuck her head through a gap in the old termite-ridden fence. They’d hated one another on sight—well, he’d hated her anyway. To illustrate the point, he’d called her a Jap, the unkindest cut of all.
This stand-off had lasted around six months; time is hard to estimate when you’re small. One afternoon Tara lured the Gordon family cat Doozie into her yard—all the Gordon cats were called Doozie, regardless of gender or appearance. There she stood, triumphant, on the other side of the fence with the cat in her arms. He’d had to talk to her to get it back.
The smoke from Joe’s cigarette floated past Tara, reminding her he’d been silent a long time. “What are you thinking?” she asked.
Like most men, Joe hated the question. “I guess it’s a matter of knowing where you’re going. You don’t know where you’re going, and you don’t know what you want to do.” He broke off. “How’s your painting?”
She answered automatically, “Just going.” She was still in the back yard, still holding the cat. Besides, she had no idea how her painting was going. Although she attended art classes three nights a week, she simply painted when she felt like it. Painting didn’t lift her depression. Only love, she’d decided, would do that.
“Come on, liebchen, let’s go home.” He took her hand with its chewed fingernails and pulled her up off the steps.
For a while they leaned in silence on the church parapet, where the wide steps down made a right-angle turn. The suburb was quiet, the city hummed in the distance. The sky was clear and the moon had not yet risen. The Catholic church behind them was the one they’d served in, he as an altar boy, she as the lead girl of eight strewing rose petals before the eucharist at Easter. It was a pagan ritual the church had imported, this strewing of flower petals by virgins, but they’d known nothing of that.
“Have you ever felt you could fly?” she asked him.
Joe smiled. “I used to dream of it when I was a little boy. Flying over big cities at night like Peter Pan.”
“Oh, I never flew like that.” Tara felt sad at having missed it. “The highest I could get off the ground was about three feet. It was a terrible effort to stay up, slower than walking, and my feet kept dragging along the pavement.”
“You worry me, Tara.”
She was quick to say, “Tell me your plans.”
He said, “I’ll keep going, get my honours at the end of the year, enter the concerto competition in June next year; it’s only fifteen more months. Just one thing.” His face was in shadow, but she knew he looked squarely at her. “I want you to stay away from me.”
“But I need you. And you said at the Hop—”
“I’ve changed my mind. You’re a threat to my security. And I’m an even bigger threat to yours.”
So it was crunch time already. She should have known he wouldn’t want to involve himself with her. There was a dark streak in the Mahoney family, and he knew about it. Rumours her maternal grandfather had committed suicide on the Ipswich to Hendon rail line, her mother’s depression after the war …
Joe gave a last drag on the cigarette. Flicked the butt over the railing on to the concrete driveway below. “Let’s go.”
At the tower house, someone had left gardening tools tossed across the front steps, a pick and a shovel. With only the starlight to see by, they fell over them. Joe shook his head: Bill—he and Leigh were making a garden.
In the two weeks Tara had waited in vain for Joe to contact her, Bill and Leigh had become a couple. Now she came down from Gatton Agricultural College every weekend. Rupert was in heaven, he had someone to swap recipes with. On Friday nights he helped Bill make up the spare room for her.
With a woman in the house there wasn’t the freedom there used to be. Alastair could no longer walk naked to and from the bathroom (mercifully out of Tara’s eyeline from her perch in the loquat tree), and when the Mates were at home, Bill made them watch their language. Still, they enjoyed the puddings and the baked dinners, and the house was much cleaner.
Joe fished the wrought-iron front door key from its hiding place among the cassias and opened the heavy oak door. At 2 a.m. the house was utterly silent, illuminated only by a light someone had left on in the kitchen. They made their way through the hallway, ascended the spiral staircase to the mezzanine gallery and the five steps from the gallery to the tower.
Joe lit a candle and shut the door.
The room looked different, Tara thought, when you were inside it. The candle burned calmly, and by its light she could just discern the stacks of books and music scores piled against the walls, Joe’s battered desk, his single bed under one window, his wardrobe and three old violins hanging on hooks from the ceiling in places where the roof didn’t leak.
Tara stared at the violins. They reminded her for some reason of the film Moby Dick. “How’d you get this room?” She thought the link to the film must be the wood in the violins. But then again, maybe not.
Joe laughed. “The Mates insisted. They didn’t want to hear me practising. It’s a good room for energetic seductions.” He lay down on the bed and switched on the small bedside radio he always had tuned to the ABC. “Come and lie down beside me. You must be frozen.”
Maybe all was not lost, after all. Tara obeyed but she was tense. She’d never lain beside him before, except on a camping trip, and then they didn’t have this, whatever it was, between them.
She said, “Have you seduced many people in your time?”
“You mean how many people have I slept with? Funny girl.”
The resident possum thumped across the roof, sounding like Frankenstein’s monster. Joe stroked her arms, wrists to elbows, elbows to shoulders.
What next? Tara wondered. Trying for casual, she pointed to the violins suspended from the ceiling. “What do you put them up there for?”
“You mean the fiddle-de-dees? They please me aesthetically. Hey, let’s go in for some tactile stimulation.”
There was that laugh in his voice. His hands were on her shoulders. Although she’d known him since kindergarten, he was new to her this way. He pulled her towards him now that he was sure. She turned her head from side to side, laughing, yet her whole being was drawn too.
She was still struggling when he kissed her.
This was definitely something new. In the past, she’d managed to slip from the clutches of randy males who’d taken her home from some do. This was different. She was just giving way to the pleasure when he got under her blouse somehow and placed his hands on her breasts through the fabric of her bra.
Tara pulled away. She was self-conscious about her breasts because they were small. “Don’t, Joe, don’t!”
“My hands are cold.”
She sensed his grin in the darkness.
“You little wretch, Tara.” He rolled over on to his back and laughed. “You’ve got all the boys fooled. They think you’re hot stuff.”
The change of pace confused her. Although she hadn’t wanted him to touch her breasts, she hadn’t wanted him to stop completely. “I don’t look sexy. I’m too skinny,” she managed to say.
In an era when the west’s sex symbol was Marilyn Monroe, Tara couldn’t reach forty-four kilograms. Every Saturday morning, she’d pedal her bike to the shopping centre and stand on the ancient, silver-frosted Victorian weighing machine with its table of ideal weights for males and females of different bone structures. The machine said her ideal weight was nine stone, two pounds—fifty-eight kilograms in today’s lingo. Each Saturday the hands on the dial would get to six stone, thirteen pounds and hover there, one pound short of seven stone, which sounded so much better, she thought, than six stone, thirteen. Then she’d ride her bike back home, blinded by tears, the bike hitting every pothole in the road.
“You’re not skinny,” Joe told her. “You’re little, that’s all. Most men like their women little. So they can bully them.” He made another lunge for her.
Tara fended him off. “I should’ve warned you you’d find my morals boring. But I like cuddling,” she ventured.
“Then let’s cuddle.”
He put one arm around her, and she snuggled against his chest. They listened to the radio for a while. Mostly, she listened to the thudding of Joe’s heart.
“Aah, Hadyn,” he said. “I love Haydn.”
“Do you?” Tara didn’t like it at all. She thought it was all tweedle dee dee dee while the peasants starved in the streets.
“It’s so uncomplicated, no neuroses.” Joe lay on his back and looked at her with half-shut eyes through thick black lashes. “Funny little girl, little baby girl. Wouldn’t you like to be a woman?”
Tara’s stomach turned over at the thought. It was horrible being human: blood, faeces, diseases and, finally, death.
“It’s a pity, because I’m very good at it.”
“There speaks a humble man.”
“Well, I am.”
Whether he was referring to his prowess, his humility, or both, Tara couldn’t say. Probably both, she thought. She inspected one of his strong tanned hands in the candlelight. “One finger’s bent, sort of warped.”
“Like me. Warped from the fiddle. It’s my bow finger.”
They were silent for a long time after that.
“Still go to church?”
She said she did.
His eyes closed. “Good. Keep it up.” And, just like that, he was asleep.
Tara opened the old casement and leaned on the sill. A crescent moon rode the night sky, and that should have been a lonely feeling, but it wasn’t. A car went past, its radio leaving patches of music on the still night air.
Tara told herself she’d made some progress. She was on the other side of the window.
Unknown to Tara at the time, her friend Cass Clayton and Cass’s great love Ling Chang were floating on the river on the bedstead again; Cass liked making love in unusual places. “You mad coot!” Tara exclaimed when Cass told her later. “Weren’t you cold?” “Oh, we took an eiderdown,” Cass laughed.
Like the song said, they had their love to keep them warm; they were naked under that eiderdown. Although they were in no danger from boats in a channel so close to the shore, Ling had hung hurricane lamps from the bedhead’s finials, while two fishing lines trailed from the finials at the bedstead’s foot. He was hoping for fish. The Mates’ larder was running low.
The night was clear. The stars were very bright.
“They shine brightly for you, Copper-haired Woman,” Ling said.
Chang Ling—Ling Chang as he was known to his Australian friends—was quiet, good looking and gracious. He came from the island of Java, where his people had lived for four hundred years.
Cass asked, “Any news on your visa?”
Ling lit a cigarette and placed it between her lips. “Nothing. But it’s only a formality. I’ll just write to my government and the Australian Immigration Department and ask for another extension. They’ll give it to me; they’ve been doing it for ten years.”
He passed her a glass of water poured from an old wine flagon. She always craved water after their lovemaking. It was such an inevitable thing, that glass of water, that it had become a joke with them.
Cass had father problems too, but hers were different from Tara’s. She was the only child of a racist federal MP, a staunch supporter of the White Australia Policy. She’d been barely out of high school when she met Ling Chang at a poetry reading. He survived one meeting with the MP.
Ling began to discuss Cass’s relationship with her father, who was a widower. “He doesn’t ill treat you?”
“Hell, no, I’m treated damn well.”
“Don’t curse.”
Cass puffed angrily on the cigarette. “I’m not cursing. To answer your question, I’ve hardly anything to do, apart from the stinking entertaining, except write poetry and read about the Roman Empire.”
“Your poetry’s beautiful.”
“Not as beautiful as you, Undesirable Alien. Undesirable, oh, what a joke.” She slid her fingers along the insides of his thighs, took hold of him.
Ling stirred. “I’m tired of this sneaking around. I want you with me in the mornings. I want it legal.”
Cass was silent. A small power boat chugged past in the middle of the river. Their improvised raft rocked for a few minutes as the boat’s wash reached them.
“You are thinking about your father, aren’t you?”
“Ling, he doesn’t dislike you personally, he just—”
“Disapproves of Asians, yes. No daughter of his is going to live in the colonies and raise a tribe of half-breeds. What’s wrong with Australian men, aren’t they good enough? I have heard it all before.”
“Please Ling, he didn’t mean to be so angry. It’s just that he’s quick-tempered.”
“A government minister should be even-tempered, not ranting and raging. So now we must meet in secret. I don’t like it, Cass. My father is one of the most important landowners in Java. We are not a family to be treated with contempt, we have background and culture. Yet your father treated me as if I were a rickshaw coolie.”
“Please, Ling, try to understand. He doesn’t dislike you personally. And what of your father anyway? How does he really feel about your wanting to marry me?”
Ling touched her nipples. “Women are beautiful things, you know. Men are big and rough, and the western ones are hairy. But women are smooth and soft and beautiful.”
“Ah,” Cass laughed, “but men are so strong and tough and handsome.”
“Men are ugly. You can see the outline of their balls when they sit down. But women …” He kissed her. Just as he had learned to look for half an hour after their lovemaking, there was the faint tang of his semen on her breath. That she was so saturated with his lovemaking always excited him again. He pulled her against him. “Oh, there isn’t enough of you.”
“Nor of you, nor of you, nor of you …”
She gasped as he entered her, wrapped her legs around him and sank her teeth into his shoulder. When he came his cry was not the usual gasping one of relief, but the sound a man might make on splitting the skull of his enemy in battle.
Always that triumphant cry would hang in the air afterwards, until one of them spoke, dispelling it.
4
And was Tara devious, as subsequent events seem to indicate? Lacking in confidence might have been a more accurate description. Tara couldn’t wait at a bus stop by herself. She felt so insubstantial she was afraid the bus wouldn’t stop for her and often trudged great distances to find a stop with people waiting at it. She was the kind of person to whom saleswomen were rude. She could be reduced to tears by a clerk in a bank. Too humble.
Some of these difficulties she could trace to her father, who played such an important role in the disaster simply by being himself: demented, drunk, damaged from the war. If she’d had a halfway decent home life and hadn’t had to spend half her nights in a tree, perhaps she would not have been so vulnerable—but who knows? Maybe she was born vulnerable. Like her mother.
She was around enough to know what a typical morning was like for Jack Mahoney. On waking, he’d groan, as if he were sorry to find himself still on the planet. Next, he’d reach for the Bex and the glass of water that stood at the ready on his bedside table. He couldn’t face the mornings without that headache powder, the hangover had to be laid back a bit before he could contemplate the day.
After the phenacetin kicked in, Mahoney would rise slowly to his feet and pull on a dressing gown. Sometimes he’d sigh out loud, “Thank god for the RSL.” People there “didn’t look at you sideways, didn’t ask you stupid questions about what you did in the war”. Jack Mahoney always insisted he hadn’t seen much action, that he’d spent most of his time sitting about with his platoon in the rain, waiting for Jap patrols that never came.
