The High Places Read online

  A man in uniform called out and she understood that it was forbidden to sit on the stones. That seemed right to her, so she stood. She wanted to apologise to someone, but the only person she saw when she passed under the Lion Gate was Eric. He was standing on the edge of the slope with his right hand shading his eyes, his right hand pressed against his great American head, and in this stance his Viking ancestors were so visible, sailing the North Sea in their longboats, that the whole country of Greece became the frigid ocean and there was nothing to do but hurry into the boat with Eric, who would captain it so surely.

  Janet stood beside him and read aloud from a small sign: ‘Grave Circle A.’ Grave Circle A was a ring of stones laid out beneath them. Archaeologists had pulled the men and gold from it many years ago. Eric didn’t even look at it; he stared across the valley. Janet realised that she had never really been alone with him before. She might say to him, Your wife slept with another man in my apartment yesterday afternoon. With Christos of Marathon, who was hungry after all. She might say, Your wife fell in love with another man in England.

  Eric said, ‘Nothing prepares you for the light.’

  It was impossible to pity a man like this. He was a god, really – remote and ineffectual. He belonged in this kind of place, in the ruins of something he’d fought for and won. But she noticed his hands were shaking.

  ‘I’ve finished my water,’ he said.

  Then he fell. He dropped the way a jacket does, slipping off a coathanger: an elegant draping subsidence. Soundless, and although he collapsed on himself at first, he then rolled out across Janet’s feet, so that by the time people came she’d fallen too and couldn’t quite understand how to get up. Murray ran toward her, curiously nimble. Eric lay heavily across her legs, but Murray moved him without difficulty, lifting her out and away and to her feet. She was dazed by the sun and the dust, by Eric’s mournful face and upturned hands; painted clouds above, rocks below, and doves among the stones. The view over blank hills that were green without being green, the constant haze at the horizon. Janet thought of this later as the failure of a man, the great, impossible end of Eric, although Eric didn’t actually end but woke drearily, halfway to Athens, in the back of the van with spit dried at the corners of his mouth. It was only sunstroke. He was thirsty, his head ached, and he cried a little – Murray and Janet heard him cry in the seat behind them. His head lay in Amy’s lap and she stroked and soothed him.

  ‘Shhh,’ she said. ‘Shhh.’

  Janet sat beside Murray. They held hands. Greece took place outside the windows of the van. She rested her head on Murray’s shoulder and said, ‘It’s far too hot. We never should have come.’ But she was glad they had.

  In Sydney, it was six o’clock. The lamps came on in the Dwyers’ house, all at once, in the empty windows.

  Man and Bird

  In the hour of his humiliation, Reverend Adams still wore his hat: a black bowler that sat upright on his narrow head, like a fortified town on a hilltop. His clerical shirt was also black, and his single-breasted jacket (all three buttons firmly fastened), and his trousers and shoes, but all in slightly different shades, which gave him a regrettably scruffy look, simultaneously prismatic and funereal. The parish had great hopes for him at first. He’d had excellent theological training, came with good references, and was moreover unmarried, which stirred the ashes of many a virgin breast; and so, in the beginning, when he entered his new congregation, it was as a bridegroom into a rose garden.

  His appearance was promising. The slope of his nose, echoed in the angle of his chin, gave an impression of profound endurance. There was a suggestion of sculpture in the marble-like whiteness of his skin. Yes, he was prim and pallid, in excellent health, with well-made ears, and in his battered blacks he presented a respectable, even slightly romantic figure. Also, he was kindly. He walked with an incongruous maritime swell that might, in another man, have passed for a swagger, and was careful in the maintenance of a small yellow car that he rarely drove faster than seventy kilometres an hour. He spoke in long, dignified sentences, rich in clauses, reminiscent of a veterans’ parade on a memorial holiday, and as he delivered his sermons he had a tendency to rise to the tip of his toes, so that finally he appeared to be levitating behind the pulpit. This was disconcerting, but forgivable. He also caused a minor stir early on when he removed two ancient trees from the churchyard because, he said, they interfered with the grass.

  What worried people most of all was his parrot.

  It was fitting that a man of Reverend Adams’s calling should have acquired few objects on his way through the world, but why should one of them be a parrot? An entirely white parrot too, as if it had once been red and yellow and green and blue but was now in some kind of Chinese mourning, except for the sulphur crest on the back of its head. Every member of the congregation can still recall, with perfect clarity, the appearance of that prodigious bird: the stiff crinoline of its feathers, the Pentecostal lick of yellow flame on its head, the tiny eyes and wormy claws, that grey, awful beak. When it fixed you with its enigmatic eye, it suggested nothing so much as the sorrowful ghost of a parrot, but you were aware, nevertheless, that it was not above a kind of solemn cheekiness. And when the parishioners saw man and bird together, they were reminded of certain ordinary dining rooms on whose walls fantastic wallpaper repeated bamboo and nightingales. It unnerved them to think of Reverend Adams and the parrot, alone together, eating their bachelor meals.

  As Reverend Adams settled into his position, the congregation developed the opinion that he talked too much about death, and with the wrong emphasis. The way he described it, it was as if the arrival in Heaven, the longed-for meeting with God, would be about as melancholy as you might imagine the reunion of a father and son in a railway station, under artificial light. Eternity seemed less glorious, then; it seemed a cheerless thickening of time, rather than a new expanse. And so Reverend Adams was given to understand, by certain older and well-respected members of his congregation, that his flock had begun to pray for him, that he might receive insight into the mysteries of Heaven and the inheritance awaiting him there.

  Reverend Adams withdrew to his rectory, troubled by this rebuke; trouble drawn into the furrows of his brackish brow, which he mopped with a handkerchief he kept stuffed in the pocket of his black trousers. But that night, as he slept, he dreamed of Heaven. It was a sleep so close to sleeplessness that when he woke he was able to recall every detail of his dream of paradise: the river that flowed with dull silver, the endless walls of the City of God, the streets paved with gold, and the holy clamour of the passionate elect, who worshipped God day and night without ceasing. He was led through this vision by a strange figure, half bird, half human – an archangel, he assumed – with white feathers and a tongue of fire on the back of its head. There was a quality to the light which was, it seemed to him, something like an old photograph, taken at night, in which white becomes silver and every other colour a shade of blue. This dream left him both elated and bereft – he felt he’d been born into entirely the wrong tradition to take advantage of it, and so, in his sermons, he skirted its great thicket and made instead for the sparser grove in which he’d been trained.

  Nevertheless, the slight oddness of his person increased, imperceptibly at first, but more obviously toward the end of that year. He began to pause mid-sermon as if made curious by what he’d just said. Yes, it was as if his beliefs were surprising to him; he appeared to be baffled by their mysterious survival. He resembled his parrot most uncannily at these moments because he was so like a bird suddenly given the power to understand its own speech.

  Of course, even this might have been tolerated if his behaviour hadn’t become stranger still. He took to carrying his parrot everywhere with him, perched on the back of his right hand. The bird sidled on his hand. It stepped to the left and stepped to the right. There was no distracting it from its great love: Reverend Adams. It had eyes only for him. And the Reverend, in turn, would gaze at the bird in r
espectful consultation, as if waiting for some message. This was not a particularly talented parrot, the kind that can repeat whole sentences, the kind suggestive of a soul; it only made strange stops and clicks with its plump bird tongue, bobbing up and down as if kneeling to pray or to take communion, its head cocked to one side. Stop, and click; warble, click; and stop. Even the stoutest of the Reverend’s suitors withdrew at the sight of him waiting for his parrot, and turned their hopes elsewhere.

  Of course, even this might have been tolerated if it weren’t for the sermon he delivered on Christmas morning – a joyous morning when an old truce is declared, so that the sinners of a parish, the neglectful and the ambivalent, the absent-minded and the repentant of spirit, can flock with the faithful to church and expect to be met with cheerful news of the life everlasting. But on this day of days, overwhelmed, no doubt, by the goodness of his news, Reverend Adams chose to stand at the pulpit, on his toes, and inform his congregation that their prayers had been answered: that on the previous night, and every night for months now, he had been visited by visions of Heaven so magnificent, so vivid, that the world around him seemed almost to no longer exist, and he had come to rely on his bird, that messenger of God, to guide him through it, so that he could keep his inner eye fixed on the paradise in store for God’s people. Then Reverend Adams began to weep, and as he did so his bird lifted from his arm and flew, in perfect calm, into the vast expanse under the roof of the church, which had been designed long ago to encourage men to raise their eyes Heavenward. It seemed now to have been designed for the flight of the white parrot, which continued for some time until finally the bird came to rest on the great cross in the chancel. By then the Reverend had been led away from the pulpit and, as his congregation sang carols and murmured the benediction, could be heard sobbing in the vestry. He pulled himself together, however, to stand outside the church door in order to perform his regular duty of greeting each parishioner after the service, and it was here that certain older and well-respected members of his congregation suggested to him that he might consider taking a long and possibly permanent break from his ministerial responsibilities, which appeared to be taxing him beyond endurance.

  This was the hour of his humiliation. He left the church at once. He drove with his yellow car pointed toward the sea, because this was the pattern of his annual holiday and he was unsure where else to go. A long flat plain and a range of mountains separated the Reverend from the sea. His bird rode above the steering wheel, on his right hand, as they crossed the plain and climbed the mountains, and as they descended, the clouds broke open and admitted a column of sun. Reverend Adams was moved to lower the window of his car and thrust his bird-heavy arm into the void, so that his parrot was obliged to take flight. He withdrew his arm and sealed himself in. And the white bird flew in the shaft of light above the car, above the revolving earth, until finally, man and bird together reached the sea.

  Unnecessary Gifts

  James is being a sea lily.

  ‘Look, Dad,’ he says, ‘I’m being a sea lily.’

  Unhurried, and with a submarine expression, he waves his small arms backward and forward and drifts around the room.

  ‘What would you call this kind of movement?’ he asks, waving and drifting.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘How about “undulating”?’

  He takes this on board. ‘I’m a sea lily undulating above the ocean floor. I look like a plant, but actually I’m an animal.’

  ‘You look like an animal to me,’ I say.

  ‘And when I die, I’ll turn into limestone.’

  He’s on the couch now, on tiptoes, and the way his arms wave into the room it’s truly as if they’re long green stalks. Somehow I have produced a child who is capable of pulsing with a creepy aquatic languor.

  ‘I didn’t know small boys turned into limestone.’

  ‘I may look like a plant, but actually I’m an ANIMAL. I swim around the ocean with my ROOTS.’

  James launches himself from the couch. He spends a fraction of an airborne second transfixed by the compact floating disguised life of the sea lily before landing among the carpet fluff – one arm over his face, one foot through the plywood of the china cabinet door. For this he is sent out to find his older brother. He knows he will be able to find Greg at the Wolfsons’, the Barters’, or possibly at the Carrs’, although Blake Carr has fallen from neighbourhood grace owing to the recent demise of his trampoline.

  ‘God,’ says Glenda, coming in damp from the kitchen as usual (the kitchen always unaccountably damp, and Glenda always arriving thirty seconds after an accident). ‘Your mother will love this. She hates that cabinet.’

  Glenda’s bringing me a gin and tonic. Alcohol plays no part in this story; it’s just that taking the glass from her requires me to lean forward in my chair, and this means I see James out on the street on his one true possession, a bicycle with silver pedals, heading in the direction of the Wolfsons’. This is the last moment I can account for him with any authority for some time, and what I want to do now is re-create those hours after James left the house, a sea lily disguised as a small boy. I want to know what those hours were like for him. It’s not easy. There’s the police report, the security tapes, and Tony’s brother’s statement. These things help. But the difficulty lies in the task of remembering childhood, that busy time of waiting.

  Glenda’s back is to the window. She doesn’t see him.

  * * *

  Glenda gave birth to Greg and then James with the flustered enthusiasm with which she approaches most activities. For some time afterward it was very easy to keep track of their movements. My parents supplied us with state-of-the-art devices intended to attach children to other things: strapped across our chests, immobile in the back seat of the car, bouncing in small buggies that fastened to Glenda’s bicycle. Initially, we functioned as tour guides to their lives, arranging for them to be moved from place to place. It didn’t last. First Greg, then James, acquired additional life. Their tiny bodies seemed designed for the express purpose of running quickly and cannily through department stores. Glenda showed the strain, so my mother took her to a day spa to be smothered in cool creams that smelled of supermarkets.

  ‘Philip,’ my mother said when they returned from the spa, ‘I’m worried about Glenda. I hope you’re looking after her. She seems subdued.’

  Glenda, uncharacteristically immobile with aromatherapy, lay across the couch waiting for my mother to leave as the boys stacked brightly coloured plastic blocks around her feet.

  It’s not that Glenda doesn’t get on with my parents. It would be difficult not to get on with them. They’re tanned, wear crease-free clothing, and play sociable tennis. They love Glenda and the boys with the kind of generosity that means they’ll come by for an impromptu visit and, if we’re out, wait in their car until we get home. Glenda will sigh as we pull into the driveway – a small sigh that I can hear but the boys can’t.

  ‘We were just passing,’ my mother will call, extracting herself from the hot car with the plucky expression of a dehydrated dog. My father’s arms will be full of bread rolls and newspaper cuttings and a book Glenda mentioned she liked the sound of a week ago. Our house feels smaller when they’re in it, more untidy.

  My mother has expressed her concern at our practice of allowing the boys out to play unsupervised in the neighbourhood. She once discussed it with me in the garden, where only the magpies and I could hear her.

  ‘It was fine when you were young,’ she said, with her thin, tanned voice. ‘But things aren’t the same these days.’

  ‘They never go more than three blocks away,’ I told her. ‘And we have Neighbourhood Watch.’

  ‘You know I don’t often comment on your parenting,’ she said, looking around the garden, from fence to fence, window to window, as if scouting for disguised dangers about which I know nothing.

  The boys’ social life may be confined to two or three streets but it’s still complex, fluid, and frequently
involves Glenda and me in unexpected situations. James, then, on this hot afternoon, experiencing the injustice of being barred from home, the humid repetitive earthbound feeling of not occupying the ocean floor: James goes in search of his brother on his silver-pedalled bicycle. As soon as he received this bicycle from his grandparents – for no reason, I might add, it just arrived one day – James customised it with stickers of half-men, half-monsters. Glenda’s reaction to the stickers was: ‘Your grandfather gave you that bike and he isn’t going to like these.’ I couldn’t tell you the exact moment Glenda began living as if my parents were watching her every move through secret cameras embedded in unnecessary gifts.

  ‘This one is especially gruesome,’ I said, inspecting a particular sticker. It featured something green which appeared muscular despite its delicate tentacles.

  ‘I know,’ said James, conspiratorial. ‘He doesn’t eat. He photosynthesises.’

  This is the bike James rides away on, basically homeless. That’s how his head seems – small and homeless. I look at the china cabinet, then at Glenda.

  ‘You can take the boys to the hardware store tomorrow,’ she says. ‘They love it there.’

  That’s true. Even Greg never fails to be impressed by the number of small shiny things in the world.

  * * *

  This is what I think happened. James found his brother one street away at the Wolfsons’, and Greg was unhappy to see him. The accumulating sorrow – evicted from home and now unwelcomed by a brother. I know the Wolfsons’ yard well because I’ve negotiated it when tipsy. It’s all paving, swimming pool, and plants in pots. Bev Wolfson holds parties lit by candles and the moist glow of this obstacle-course greenery. Glenda and I wonder if their plants are fake because we’re jealous of their swimming pool, despite the temporary feel of its above-ground installation.

  ‘Imagine having a swimming pool like that,’ says Glenda. ‘I’d spend all day in it, naked.’