The High Places Page 16

  ‘I’ll be seventeen when it’s born,’ said Danny, which meant her birthday must be soon, because she was big: as big as Rachel had been right before she had Marcus and Elsa. Then Danny said, ‘Your house is nice.’

  The house was messy from last night: the cushions crushed, the carpet dusty with sugar, the finished candles now just blackened tins. The big wooden windows poured with light that revealed the age of the furniture and the stains on the walls. Someone had braided half the fringe on the tall pink lampshade.

  ‘It’s my grandmother’s house. It was,’ said Cara. ‘Before she died.’

  Rachel’s door opened and she came out in her red kimono: it had a bird of paradise embroidered on the back in blue, yellow, and white. Her hair was caught in her hooped earrings. She might have been beautiful once, Cara conceded; maybe even last night.

  Rachel pulled her kimono around her waist and said, ‘Come into the kitchen.’

  The children fled the kitchen when their mother appeared. They pushed past Danny and Cara into the lounge room, wanting to be invisible, but near. Rachel didn’t seem to notice. She stood by the sink drinking water from a green glass. Cara and Danny watched as she drank one cup and then another.

  ‘Have you fed the kids?’ Rachel asked, and Danny started a little as if she might be expected to do the feeding. Cara prised bread from the freezer. Rachel sat at the kitchen table, sighing as she sat and pulling her hair out of her earrings. Danny sat too.

  ‘Adam’s gone for coffee,’ said Rachel, as if this were news. She stabbed one finger into the top of the table and picked at the Formica while Cara rattled the toaster.

  ‘I’m sorry to just show up like this,’ said Danny.

  Rachel only sighed in a hushing, regretful way, pressing down on the Formica she had picked. ‘Adam will be back soon,’ she said.

  A tear oozed from Danny’s left eye. Cara saw it. Ah, then Danny knew Adam might not be back soon. He was out on the road somewhere, walking away, not thinking of any of them. Cara knew he didn’t think of them when he was gone. He had a smooth, untroubled mind, he liked ease and cheerful noise, and small things caught his attention: a woman walking away from church in a pair of very high heels, the line of people waiting for tables outside the Chinese restaurant, the body of a baby ibis beneath a palm tree, a man on his tiny balcony, three floors up, pouring coffee from a Turkish pot. And that would remind Adam he wanted coffee. So he would keep walking, looking for coffee, happy to be out of the house and on the move; he accepted every errand, he went cheerfully to buy fish and bags of ice, and he would take Cara or Cassidy with him if they wanted to come, he would take anyone who asked, but he didn’t care if he was alone or not. He might introduce Cara as ‘Cara mia’ or, when she met his sister, only as Cara. He wasn’t afraid of Rachel. He never hurried. He would take his time.

  Occasionally a child would lift the heavy lid of the piano in the lounge room, consider the keys, and make an attempt at middle C; if Rachel heard, she’d cry out, ‘Who’s that? Who?’ It was only to hear her call that any of them ever played. ‘Who’s that? Who? Who?’ – like an owl. Today when middle C played Rachel only closed her eyes.

  ‘It was Marcus-Sparkus,’ announced Wallis.

  There was a soft, upholstered punching sound, then a crying out. Wallis ran in on spinning feet.

  ‘What are you savages doing in there?’ said Rachel wearily, as if somehow obliged, maybe because of Danny; Cara didn’t know. Danny sent a fuzzy smile in Wally’s direction. Proud, savage Wallis leaned against her mother.

  ‘Marcus hit me,’ she said.

  Marcus sang, ‘Dip dip dog shit! Up your arse with a piece of glass!’ from the lounge room, wild with the strange visitor on a Sunday morning, brave and wild. Rachel stood and went in to him. Cara didn’t call out a warning; he deserved it. You had to know Rachel might be ready for anger and equipped, this morning, with her hard, low, violent voice. You had to know you might be punished, even with a guest in the house – if weepy Danny counted as a guest. Still, Cara’s chest ached when she heard Marcus crying, when he was banished to the garden and all the children with him, and no breakfast.

  But Marcus, once outside, didn’t care; or pretended not to. Wally and the others cared for only a little longer. They were hungry, but Adam might come home with a bag of bread rolls, the way he sometimes did on Sundays, and maybe a barbecue chicken or a cardboard tray of baklava. That would be breakfast. Cara ate buttery toast at the kitchen window and watched the young ones roll in the grass. Cass was pressed to the back fence, where the Jouberts lived; they were South African and Cass liked their daughter, who sunbathed on the back deck in a bikini. Cara rolled her sickened eyes. Look what happened when you liked someone’s daughter: look at Danny, puffed at the table.

  Having exiled the children, Rachel didn’t return to the kitchen; she went into her room, closing the door behind her. Danny seemed surprised by this and looked to Cara for assistance, so Cara fussed with a little silver toast rack that had belonged to her grandmother. Her grandmother had been a sensible woman who liked objects designed for specific purposes. There were those little silver scissors on their velvet ribbon, designed for nothing but cutting flowers. Cara’s grandmother must have stood in the garden with her scissors and observed the neighbourhood and noticed the Greeks moving in (Rachel said her mother was never happy about the Greeks moving in). But she liked furniture with multiple functions. You could lift the needlepoint lid of the piano seat and find sheet music: on top, The Well-Tempered Clavier. Cara thought of her grandmother as being well tempered. She died when Cara was seven. There had been a grandfather too, who lasted longer, but he only sat in the garden reading the paper and smoking; there was something wrong with his right leg and he couldn’t speak without wheezing. All he cooked were blackened chops and baked beans from a tin, and he didn’t count as an adult in the house at night – if Rachel was out you were scared lying in bed, even as he coughed in the lounge room. He died after Marcus was born. Then the house belonged to Rachel, and that meant Rachel had to live there all the time; no more India, no more Switzerland, no more going in and out at night. So she invited her friends home instead, nearly every night at first, and then, as she got older, as she ‘settled down’ (Cara used this phrase with her schoolfriends), only on Saturdays. There were plenty of rooms in the house, but the children filled them. When friends stayed over they slept on couches or the floor.

  ‘You’ll have to sleep on the couch,’ Cara told Danny. She was protective of her private room.

  ‘Will your mum let me stay?’ Danny was braver now that Rachel wasn’t there.

  Cara shrugged, which meant yes. Why not? There were plenty of plates. There were already extra chairs at the table. Cara looked at Danny’s stomach and knew she would give up her room. Just until the baby came.

  ‘I have some money,’ said Danny. ‘For rent.’

  And she began to cry again, so that Cara had no choice but to squat beside her chair, to hold her red hands and say, ‘You sure you don’t want some toast?’

  Danny shook her head. ‘It’s just my mum,’ she said. ‘Should I tell her I’m safe?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Cara. She was so exasperated by pink, dripping, pregnant Danny. ‘The phone’s on the piano.’

  Danny, with some trouble, pulled herself out of the chair. She gave a little smile when this manoeuvre succeeded; then her face collapsed into tears and she said, ‘I can’t call while I’m like this.’

  Cara shrugged. ‘We’ll be outside,’ she said. She took a half-eaten bag of salt-and-vinegar chips into the garden.

  The children – even Cass – crowded around her. Their salty hands plunged in and out of the bag. Cara held it higher than their heads and distributed the remaining chips more slowly; the children accepted this ceremony and waited with their hands outstretched. When they dispersed, Cass took the empty bag, turned it inside out, and licked it all over.

  Cara lay in the grass. She noticed a fantastic, bell-like lift t
o the sky, a pealing quality to the light, and she peered into this high, rising brightness hoping she might burn her retinas, just a little – just enough to see something different when she looked out at the world. She drummed her heels into the ground. If I sleep here, she thought, the day will pass by, and no one will notice. It’ll be like a fairy tale. And like a fairy tale, her belly swelled the way Danny’s had; she felt it rise, a fat loaf, and she rubbed at it as if she were pregnant. Then she let out her breath and flattened again. She felt the way she did in bed at night with no one looking or asking questions or needing her. She lifted her arms over her head and expected Wally or Elsa to fall onto her legs, but they were waiting by the door for Danny to come out.

  When Danny came, she was no longer crying. She was prettier. There was a gravity about her, a sense of permission, and she shone with some other thing, some sweet sadness. It was sticky, and the children stuck. She knelt down to them. She let them take her hand and lead her through the garden, and she knew how to part a curtain of leaves so that the space on the other side became important. Cara was scornful of this indulgence. She never played with the children. She was for climbing on, for comforting, for giving orders, for hiding behind; but Danny knew how to play.

  Cara closed her eyes. She was in the Mediterranean. Adam was there with her in some hazy form. He wasn’t a body, a lover, or even a ghost, but she could touch him and he belonged to her. There was something frightening about this belonging; it took on strange geometric shapes, so that she and Adam were only lines on a bell-shaped sea. But these lines fitted together. They were double, the two of them; they were like a solution written on clean paper. Cara’s eyes had been closed for hours, she thought. Perhaps, if she opened them now, there would be nothing there. There would just be nothing.

  She opened her eyes. The garden was there, and the washing on the line, and Danny with the children. Also Rachel, unexpectedly, lying on her kimono in the middle of the lawn. She wore a green bikini and her stomach was flat and pale with little pleats of shiny pink. Her black hair funnelled into the grass. She was so white and red in the midday sun, and indestructible.

  Cara made sure to raise her voice. ‘I didn’t know he had a sister,’ she said.

  Rachel said, ‘He has three.’ She shifted her hips. ‘Three little sisters in a pretty little town.’

  But none of this could be right – the sisters, the mother, the little town. Rachel formed Adam when she brought him to the house. She found him and formed him at the same time. The sisters and mother and the father who made him say ‘Ah’ didn’t exist when he was with Cara and Rachel and the children, just as Cara and Rachel and the children didn’t exist when he was with other people.

  ‘She doesn’t look like someone who’d run away from home. Or get pregnant,’ said Cara.

  ‘Anyone can get pregnant.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure.’

  ‘I don’t have my period yet.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ said Rachel.

  Cara closed her eyes again.

  ‘What do you think they look like?’ asked Rachel. ‘People who run away?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Cara. ‘Like you.’

  Rachel laughed. She lay on the grass in the garden she grew up in, surrounded by the children she had made, and raised one hand to her forehead to block the sun. Cara saw black stubble in the armpit and was disgusted and this disgust felt righteous; she pulled a handful of shiny grass and scattered it in the hope it would fly across to annoy her mother, and when it didn’t she went inside and walked with purpose into Rachel’s room. She stood for some time looking at the messed bed, as if it might relate in some way to what she had seen earlier: the clean white paper and she and Adam, solved. And it might have, in a minute, except that the doorbell rang again, not so insistently this time; Cara thought they might not have heard it in the garden.

  Two men stood outside, fuzzed a little by the flyscreen. They had earnest expressions, they stood with their shoulders pushed back, and they seemed surprised to see her. Cara thought this must be some kind of church door-knocking thing. It was Sunday, after all: a day on which people might actually expect to be saved.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the man closest to the door. He had the hopeful look of a visiting teacher. His lips were very wet in his brown beard. ‘I’m looking for my daughter – Danielle.’

  The word ‘Danielle’ prompted the man behind him to take a step forward. He was revealed, then, as a sweet-faced tattooed boy, red-haired, with a reef of acne scars on his lower jaw. His expression wasn’t so much hopeful as pleading.

  ‘Danny,’ said the boy.

  ‘Come in,’ said Cara, and she even smiled, because they would take Danny away.

  Both men wiped their feet before stepping through the door. They shuffled into the lounge room; the boy in particular looked bereft, as if he were used to carrying large objects and was startled to find his hands empty. The father didn’t seem the kind of man to make you run away from home, though Cara recognised in herself a tendency to be fooled by the kindliness of beards. She wondered what would happen if she offered herself instead of Danny. What would her life be like in the little town, with the fairy-tale sisters?

  ‘This way,’ she said. She led them through the kitchen and out into the garden, which she presented with a flourish: long Rachel on the long grass, Adam’s five shirts buoyant on the line, Elsa naked as usual, Cass furtive at the Jouberts’ fence, Wallis running, Marcus clambering over Danny, whose abdomen seemed larger, more obscene among the passion-fruit vine and the rusted wheelbarrow and lidless washing machine, and all the small grassy nests of cans and chocolate wrappers and junk mail that gathered and grew. Everything in the garden was moving, except for Rachel; but when Cara and the men came out onto the grass, all that movement stilled. Danny held Marcus tight against one leg and touched her belly. She looked at the top of Marcus’s head, but the way she looked at it was for the sad, red, tattooed boy.

  ‘Mum,’ said Cara.

  ‘Yes,’ said Rachel, without opening her eyes.

  ‘Mum.’

  Rachel propped herself on her elbows, glorious in green, almost naked. Marcus disentangled himself from Danny and went to join the other children, who watched from the rim of the garden with shut faces.

  The man stepped forward. His shadow fell across Rachel’s legs and she moved them.

  ‘Sorry to bother you,’ he said, but this seemed not to have been the way he wanted to begin, and he shook his head a little, as if clearing it. ‘Greg Armstrong,’ he said. ‘And this is Jonathan.’

  ‘Johnno,’ said the boy.

  Cara felt that more might be required. ‘Danny’s – you know – Johnno,’ she said.

  Johnno wiped his feet on the lawn and Rachel’s head fell back as if in exhaustion. Her narrow neck seemed to spring out sunless from the grass.

  ‘Adam’s not here,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve come for my daughter,’ said the man, his hands spread like a salesman. He looked at Danny and said, ‘Danny,’ and she kicked at the grass with one foot and didn’t raise her eyes. ‘Danielle,’ he said. His voice was louder this time.

  Rachel sighed and turned onto her stomach. Cara thought for a moment she might undo her bikini top and make them all endure her loose white breasts.

  The man now gave off a beleaguered air. He was winding himself into complaint. He was lost in the garden, and frightened of Rachel; he might be the kind who felt most aggrieved when outmatched. Possibly he loved Danny and would be persistent in that love, although he had done something to make her leave home.

  ‘Danny, come on now,’ he said. ‘You don’t belong here.’

  Danny moved closer to Rachel, as if for safety, and Cara saw that this was wise. Probably there was no safety at all in the garden, but if there were any, it would come from Rachel; she was its only possible source. In order to win, the man must make himself calm and purposeful, show no fear of Rachel’s nakedness, take his
daughter and run from the garden. Cara wanted to push him in the small of his back. She wanted to counsel him. She wanted to help Johnno too, because she liked the way the holes in his earlobes meant she could see through them to the other side.

  But now Rachel was moving. She was pulling the kimono up from the grass. This seemed to give Danny courage. ‘I’m staying here, Dad,’ she said. ‘With Adam.’

  ‘Adam!’ said the man. He spat it – Adam. Cara had never heard an ‘Adam’ like this. She stepped away from the man to further study his face, but it was hidden by beard and age and seemed ordinary enough, just a father’s face. He wore pale jeans, loose at the knee, belted, with a tucked-in short-sleeved shirt. His back pocket bulged with wallet. He was the father of brown Adam, who went down the front path with his coins ringing loose. The man’s ordinariness now seemed a great failure.

  ‘I’ve had just about enough of this,’ said Adam’s father.

  Rachel stood, wrapped in red.

  ‘This is my house,’ she said, with her most precise smile.

  ‘No one’s denying that.’

  ‘And Danny is welcome here.’

  ‘She belongs with her family.’

  ‘Adam is her family,’ said Rachel, so reasonably, thought Cara, with such settled purpose in her pale face. She wasn’t arguing with the man, didn’t care if he spoke again; she had made her decision and would now enforce it.

  ‘Get the children inside,’ said Rachel to Cara. Cara didn’t move, but the children, even Cassidy, went into the house, where they let out a shout or two, and one high-pitched whistle.

  ‘Danny,’ said Rachel, and held out her hand. Danny took it.

  ‘She’s eight months pregnant,’ said the man.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Rachel. She moved over the grass in her gold sandals, taking Danny with her. They were going to the house – inside – they were going to disappear inside the house, and Cara would go with them and leave the man and Johnno in the garden to huff and puff. But Johnno, with his tattoos and freckles, looked as if he would cry.

  ‘You stupid bloody selfish child,’ said the man, and Cara checked to see who he might be talking to. But he was looking at the sky, in the direction of the church’s cross. It was hard to see in the daytime, but at night it lit up in neon blue. Cara drew a line between the top of the cross and Adam’s father’s face.