The High Places Read online

  Rose couldn’t see Adelaide Turner with the dancers, but she hoped she might, later on. Perhaps they would meet beside the polar bear and talk together on the subject of his greenish fur and his obvious disgruntlement in the unlooked-for heat. Then, tomorrow after work, while the Coral Sea unloosed from the city and took Susan and Adelaide to America, Rose could tell Robert about it. Or she could not tell him, just as she pleased.

  Rose followed Susan and the children to the aquarium, with its rocky grottoes and litter of Pacific shells. Afterward, they saw the Malayan bears and spider monkeys. A band played in the rotunda and children sat by a pond while a Sunday-school teacher read instructions from a piece of paper. There was a black rhinoceros calf, but Lizzie and Alex seemed annoyed by baby animals of any kind. Alex’s eyes remained on the ponderous mother and Lizzie drooped against the fence.

  ‘Is this the first time Julia’s seen a rhino?’ asked Rose.

  Now Lizzie looked hard at the baby. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  Both children had begun the excursion with enthusiasm but were now almost shy. They stood on either side of the floral clock, following its fragrant moving hands; they remained silent on the little zoo train as it slid alongside emus and mountain goats. The very fact of mechanical movement seemed to have stunned them into noiselessness. It was as if their excitement for their trip to Sydney, and beyond to California, had all been worn out in the preparation for it; the actual journey was so large they couldn’t account for it. Susan appeared not to mind. Rose assumed her sister knew, from experience, that careful days of planned good cheer often turn out this way.

  The children were too afraid to enter the reptile house, which was dark and green and cool. Alex lingered by the doorway, terrified but unwilling to leave. Lizzie couldn’t even bring herself to look at the picture of the snake on the sign. Their mother, for the first time, was visibly frustrated with them both. As Susan called Alex away, a flock of dancers ran screaming from the reptile house, women at first, then men leaping and laughing. They’d obviously given the women a scare – a snake-hiss, a careful brush against someone’s ankle, a low-voiced story that ended in shouts. Now the women clapped and scolded. Rose knew Adelaide Turner even without her costumes and wigs and drawn-on eyebrows; her round face and the agile manner of her walk were unmistakable. She looked very young. Adelaide called to one man – ‘Roger, what did I tell you? No cake for weeks!’ – and when Roger hung his head and arms in mock dejection, she mimicked his pose perfectly, teasing. Her blunt accent wasn’t as beautiful as her dancing. Rose could have taken one step and been in her path; she could have said, ‘Excuse me, Miss Turner?’ But what if Adelaide was to smile as if Rose had just called her name in order to say, Your table’s ready, your car is here? There was no way to tell Adelaide about the nocturnal gulls after the theatre, the sensation of her body rising from the bed. Rose watched the dancers walk down the hill toward the seal pools, the women quiet now, holding hands and resting their heads on their friends’ shoulders. It seemed ridiculous, then – juvenile – to have cut out Adelaide’s picture and put it on the mantelpiece.

  Susan sat on the low wall beside the reptile house.

  ‘I want the snakes,’ said Alex. He had run into the building, quickly in and out, made brave by the presence of the dancers.

  ‘Well, Lizzie?’ said Susan.

  Like Rose, Lizzie was watching the procession walk toward the seals. She waited until the dancers were out of sight before turning to her mother.

  Susan said, ‘What do you think of taking your brother in to see the snakes? While your old mum has a rest out here.’

  ‘I’ll take him,’ said Rose.

  ‘I want to,’ said Lizzie. She gave a small, triumphant laugh. ‘I was never frightened of the snakes.’

  Alex seemed uneasy. He ran back into the semi-dark and his sister followed him.

  ‘They’re tired, aren’t they?’ said Rose.

  Susan didn’t answer at once. Then she said, ‘We’re all tired, I think.’

  ‘You must be. So much to organise.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something. It’s absurd,’ said Susan. ‘It’s that I’m sure I’m going to see Jonathan again. I have that feeling. As if he’s waiting for me in California. You know, they say the climate there is basically Australian, and there’s the coast and gum trees.’ She laughed the way Lizzie had before saying, ‘I was never frightened of the snakes.’

  Rose held her sister’s hand, which may never have happened before; Susan was years older and rarely tender. Rose didn’t love her, but then she thought of love as a hasty secret that drew out, eventually, into something slow and denied and sought and carefully planned. Loving Jonathan had been small for her at first, and then grew smaller, but it was in this smallness that she had found pleasure and safety, as if the secrecy had necessarily pushed it into a tiny space of compacted intensity. Anything larger would have frightened her; would have led to change, or confession. Rose was made impatient by confession. The possibility of it had sent her to Sydney. And it was better, wasn’t it, that she could sit like this with Susan, holding hands.

  The afternoon was beginning to lengthen. Currawongs cried out of bubbling throats. There were also stranger sounds that travelled through the air from an indeterminate source, as if sprung from the mouths of some outlandish animal and his equally extraordinary mate. These noises hummed at the back of the ear along with other incidental roars and calls and trumpets that filled this unfamiliar world, briefly jungle, briefly savannah and mountain range. Rose understood before Susan did that the noises were coming from the children. She ran toward the reptile house.

  It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. The light was low and green and the glass cases seemed to swim out of it, full of leafy foliage, full of fake creeks and desert rocks and their jewelled inhabitants, mostly sleeping.

  ‘Lizzie!’ called Rose.

  ‘You killed her,’ Lizzie was yelling, over and over. ‘You killed her! You pushed! You killed her.’

  There was another sound, thinner: Alex crying out, high-pitched. Somewhere in the dark he was struggling and crying. The snakes didn’t move, except one python that continued to bury itself in the sand of its tank.

  ‘You killed her!’ Lizzie yelled again, and Alex cried and Rose ran through the corridors into the green darkness, afraid of what might be at her feet. Then Susan was there too; she also ran, breathing loudly, calling, and Rose saw her every now and then flashing against a lit case.

  Rose found them first. They were deep in the reptile house, on the floor below the tank of a large, pouchy lizard. Alex lay on his back and Lizzie sat astride his chest, pinning his shoulders with her knees. She hit at his head again and again with her palms, her face teary and furious. Alex was half hidden beneath her; his legs rose slightly with each blow, his hands opened and closed, and his shoulders strained as Lizzie pressed tighter with her knees. She hit at him until Rose dragged her away, and even then she kicked at him with her bony shoes, and scratched and bit at Rose.

  Lizzie quieted when Susan reached Alex. They were all quiet until they came out into the light, then Lizzie pulled herself from Rose’s arms and began to scream. She opened her throat and a large noise came from it, much larger than she was. The effort of it shook her whole body, and closed her eyes, and turned her red. Children walking past the reptile house stopped to look; their parents hurried them on. ‘Someone’s tired!’ called one jovial man. Rose smiled at him. She realised he thought she was Lizzie’s mother.

  ‘Elizabeth Rose,’ said Susan. Alex had slithered to the ground and pressed his face against his mother’s legs. Now Susan shouted, ‘Elizabeth!’

  Lizzie stopped screaming. She sat on the ground, limp, worn out by the exertion of being so angry.

  ‘Explain yourself,’ said Susan. ‘We are going home immediately, you have ruined our day, but first you will tell me why you behaved so badly, so terribly, I’ve never been so ashamed of you. And no nonsense, Lizzie, no silline
ss about anybody killing anybody else.’

  ‘But he did,’ said Lizzie, collected now, and sullen.

  Susan smacked her lightly on the arm. Lizzie opened her mouth as if to scream again, but she looked across at Rose and didn’t.

  ‘I’m not lying,’ she said. ‘Alex killed Julia.’ And now she began to cry in messy, unfeigned gulps, staring at her mother.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Susan.

  ‘Alex pushed her off the ferry. While we were getting on the ferry he pushed her off the bridge we walked on and she fell in the sea and drowned and she’s dead forever.’ This through sobs full of air and water.

  ‘She did not drown,’ Alex called out. He turned to Rose and she noticed blood in his hair. ‘She didn’t.’

  ‘You hurt your brother,’ said Susan. ‘You attacked your brother. Where does this come from, Lizzie? Why do you make these things up?’

  ‘All right!’ Lizzie cried. Then her voice became very quiet. ‘I pushed her. Not Alex. I pushed her because there’s no room for her on the big boat. No, I didn’t push her. She fell in the water while we walked across the bridge because there were too many people. I didn’t help her. I didn’t help her because she can’t come in our window on the boat. And now she’s dead forever.’

  Lizzie lay back on the dirt of the path that led to the reptile house.

  * * *

  Rose waited for a long time on a bench outside the zoo’s first- aid clinic. Below her the lions slept in the afternoon light. She wondered if the flying boats passed over the lions as they lifted out of Rose Bay. She wondered what Robert was doing now, with his wife and children; they might walk past her here at the zoo, gathered together, weary, cross, loving, bound for home; it seemed as likely as having seen Adelaide Turner on the hillside with the giraffes and Harbour Bridge behind her. The clinic door opened and Susan stepped out. She was red with worry; her eyes were swollen and red.

  ‘The children won’t co-operate with me in there,’ she said. ‘They won’t let go of my arms. It’s best I leave them. I think it’s best.’

  ‘I’m sure it is,’ said Rose. She stood beside her sister; she was the taller by at least an inch.

  ‘They’ll only be a minute,’ said Susan. ‘Just being checked over. Getting cleaned up.’

  ‘Shall we go right home?’

  Susan nodded. Rose wished, at that moment, to be quick with comfort and easy with words. But it was Susan who spoke. She said, ‘Is there anyone for you, right now?’

  Rose watched the lions and their sunned flanks. They breathed deeply, rib-movingly, as if the light were a weight upon them.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Will we meet him? Or is that … difficult?’

  Rose shook her head, very slightly, perhaps to say no, perhaps to shake off her sister’s question. ‘You don’t know him,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t expect to know him. I don’t know anyone in this city of yours. Just looking at it, I think might be too much for me. All this water, those boats, the houses. And I don’t know a soul in them.’

  Rose looked out over her city.

  ‘There are some schoolfriends,’ said Susan. ‘I should have looked them up, shouldn’t I? A few girls. Married.’

  ‘Married’ sounded to Rose like a white, tall, marble word. It sounded like a word she might stand on – not to crush it, but in order to see farther. The city rose up out of the harbour, not far away, but it seemed to float on the opposite shore of an unplumbed sea. If Rose hadn’t left for Sydney, Jonathan might have told Susan; they might have left together. There would be no Alex. But Jonathan would still have got sick. What I most want, thought Rose, is to be quiet, and private, and not to upset anybody. She knew, at the same time, that this could not be what she most wanted.

  The children emerged from the clinic. Lizzie held Alex’s hand, and he didn’t mind. They looked happy and tired. Their father was dead.

  * * *

  Rose left work at lunchtime on Monday even though Robert had made plans with her for the early evening. She told people she was sick, and because she was never sick – because she was ‘particularly pleasant’ – they believed her. Robert could be, this once, unmet. She sat by her window all afternoon, waiting for the Coral Sea to sail between Rose Bay and the zoo with both Susan and Adelaide Turner on it. When it did Rose tried to count its windows, none of which belonged to Julia. She watched the small shapes on deck in the hope of finding somebody she recognised. Jonathan would have had binoculars. The harbour and the afternoon sun took turns with the light. Rose Bay rocked on the edge of the Coral Sea’s wake, a small sea with tides in it. Rose wasn’t sad. She wasn’t lonely. She sat at her window and watched the ship disappear, little by little, toward America.

  Violet, Violet

  Mr Kidd’s bird looked like an ordinary budgerigar: blue, with a yellow face, black dots at the neck, and zebra-striped wings. It spoke three words: ‘hello’, ‘knock’, and ‘Violet’, which late in the night sounded like ‘violent’ and worried Christopher, at first, as he heard it through the thin walls of his room at the St George Hotel. His room was small and oppressively tidy; the television attached to a bracket on the ceiling above the writing desk made Christopher think of a hospital; his clothes filled no more than one-third of the wardrobe; and the words ‘violent, violent’ issued through the left-hand wall from a voice not quite human.

  Christopher had lived at the St George for three weeks before he met Mr Kidd. If he hadn’t been so wary of his surroundings, they might have met earlier: waiting for the lift, in the lobby, or in the communal bathrooms that dripped with a listless mildew. But Christopher took the stairs rather than the lift, and joined a gym in order to shower there. He walked quickly through the hotel lobby because he was afraid of being caught in conversation with a man like Mr Kidd: a man in a raincoat, a formless man, perpetually sodden, with a hopeful and lonely look, carrying an unredeemable briefcase. Being in the lobby generated a feeling of queasy anticipation, as if some terrible thing might happen at any moment. Christopher passed through at eight every morning on his way to the city library, and he returned just after six. He climbed the stairs and flung the door of his room open wide in case someone was concealing himself behind it. He urinated in his basin so that he might avoid the bathrooms for anything but more substantial needs. The pigeons in the eaves of the St George Hotel filled Christopher’s room with their amorous clatter, and he peered up at them through his scuffed window, most of which had been sacrificed to an air-conditioning unit. He looked at the pigeons with the boredom that comes of a temporary life in an unknown city. Who was this man he’d briefly become? He had no hobbies or preferences or appetites.

  This was why Christopher crossed the lobby looking only at his feet. It was why he was so cold to Mr Kidd – in his own politely imperceptible way – at their first meeting.

  This meeting took place on a Monday that Christopher had forgotten was a public holiday. It was easy to lose track of these things while living in hotels and libraries; time took on a different, interminable aspect. He set out from the St George at his accustomed hour and discovered, upon arrival, that the library was closed. Something like panic flared in his chest. He was frightened by the thought of the librarians – those helpful, faceless beings who moved quickly through his slow days – relaxing with friends and family in unknown houses all around him. He was unmoored by the locked doors of the library, by the untried city, by his own confusion. At this moment, he longed for the surety of his room at the St George, with its cosy lamp bolted to the bedside table and his pile of scholarly photocopies. But when he returned to the hotel just after nine, his room was full of cleaning materials and the door was half open, although there was no maid to be seen. Christopher placed his backpack on the bed and sat beside it, unsure of what to do. When would the maid return? Would she leave when she saw him? Could he remove her equipment, close the door, and refuse to let her back in? None of these possibilities seemed feasible to him.
Instead, he took a pen from his bedside table and the top article from the photocopy pile, stepped over the vacuum cleaner curled dragon-like around a mound of buckets and cloths, and made his way downstairs to the lounge.

  The lounge of the St George Hotel was attached to the lobby by a despondent archway wreathed in floral detail. Nevertheless it was a separate room, cut off from the lobby and the lobby’s promise of the street by an atmosphere of lonely sociability. Christopher had only ever been half aware of the movement of unknowable people in its indistinct corners. Now he entered it with purpose, photocopies tucked into his armpit. He noticed a table offering free tea and coffee. This discovery buoyed him; he made himself tea. The room wasn’t empty. Men read papers, they tied their shoelaces on low chairs, they hummed into telephones. All men. The St George had been extending its hospitality to male travellers for eighty years, and its look of faithful resignation suggested that a war was taking place and shortages could be expected. Everything – the discoloured carpet, the honeycomb woodwork – shyly implied the hotel’s former dignity, and the lounge, as a result, retained a gossipy climate in which affable, friendless men flourished. Christopher found a seat and settled there, balancing pen and tea and article. He began to read. He began to relax. The tea was barely warm. Almost immediately Mr Kidd approached him.

  ‘About time we saw you down here,’ said Mr Kidd. He offered his hand. ‘Bob Kidd. I’m in the room next to yours.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Christopher, looking up. And then, on seeing the hand and feeling flustered and polite, ‘I’m Christopher.’ He took the hand. The shake was firm, so firm he felt himself rising, just a little, from his chair. Mr Kidd lifted the air behind his trousers as if he were wearing a morning suit and settled into the seat beside Christopher’s. He seemed trim and energetic, youthfully old, with a beard-bordered redness to his face suggestive of whiskey and Sunday walks.