The Life to Come. Michelle De Kretser

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ he chose fried eggplant as a safer bet.

      “Don’t you like the dhal?” asked Cassie. She slid the dish forward, to Ash’s alarm. “I followed the recipe exactly. But obviously leaving out the Maldive fish.”

      Ash assured her that the dhal was terrific. “Everything is. But I absolutely couldn’t eat another thing.”

      Cassie helped herself to wine. Her expression as she drank was particularly aloof. He had disappointed her, Ash saw. But why? Their conversation seemed inoffensive yet at cross-purposes, like her clashing chairs. Cassie had told him the story of her childhood, describing the rain forest and the way it rained. She had been traveling in South America when her parents sold their mud-brick house and the acres in which it stood, and moved to a coastal town. Cassie didn’t say, The minute my back was turned; but Ash understood that betrayal was involved. She had become a visitor in a museum, said Cassie, by which she meant that the near past had turned mythical and remote. Its glassed-off exhibits made up a kingdom that she had imagined would last forever. The name of her museum was Time, but she was still young enough to believe that everything that happened to her was unique. “Exhibit A,” she said, showing Ash a framed photograph of a lush valley bridged with a rainbow. It was nothing like Yukkendrearie. But now, sitting among the ruins of their banquet, Watch out! said Ash to Ash. This pliable girl was a product of the real Australia. There was the heedless way she treated books. No striding up hills in a hat, Ash warned himself. Cassie, too, might prove unimaginable. She might turn out to be nothing like porridge, not even porridge with salt.

      Cassie arranged to meet Pippa at a bookshop. She found her in the Australian section, a mazy arrangement in a poorly lit area near the back. Pippa emerged, hissing, “They have exactly one copy of my novel. I turned it face out.”

      In the place that had the best coffee that side of Parramatta Road, Pippa asked, “So how’d you go the other night? Did you make the pumpkin curry in the end?” Pippa was an amazing cook. She put on dinners for twelve that involved lemons she had preserved. It was Pippa who had recommended the Charmaine Solomon cookbook that Cassie had consulted to prepare her feast.

      “I couldn’t go veggo for anyone,” went on Pippa. Her sharp little face turned pensive. “But I guess you got used to all those chickpeas growing up.”

      Pippa and Cassie had met at high school up north. Cassie was one of the few people in Sydney who knew that Pippa had once been called Narelle. Pippa had filed the application to change her name on her eighteenth birthday. She said, “No one called Narelle’s ever going to win the Booker.” Even before that, even when Pippa and Cassie shut themselves into their bedrooms and sobbed because River Phoenix was dead, Pippa had known that she was going to be a writer. The clarity Pippa brought to her objectives was one of the things Cassie envied about her. Cassie was twenty-nine, and the future, as she saw it, remained uncontrollable and vague. She was afraid of being twenty-nine. It was much worse than thirty, the ax hovering before it fell.

      She said, “I don’t think Ash liked the dhal.”

      “Too salty, maybe? Or not salty enough? Lentils can be tricky,” said Pippa. The offhand way she spoke told Cassie that Pippa didn’t care for the sound of Ash. As if to confirm it, Pippa asked, “So when do I get to meet the great man?”

      “It’s early days still,” said Cassie. It was three months. Cassie and Ash only saw each other alone, never with other people; Cassie told herself that what they wanted from each other didn’t involve other people. To counter Pippa’s expression, Cassie told her about something that had happened the previous week. Ash and Cassie were heading to the city on a bus. They had risen for their stop when a woman shouted, “Speak English, you fucken boat jumpers!” This was directed at two African men, an old one and a younger one, talking quietly to each other. Ash and Cassie got off the bus, and Cassie said, “How awful. I should have said something. I’m so sorry.”

      Ash replied, “Oh, that woman was probably afraid that anyone speaking a foreign language was insulting her.”

      He was capable of that, of surprising grace. It struck Cassie as such generosity of spirit that it couldn’t fail to impress. However, all Pippa said was, “‘Boat jumpers’ is pretty good.” She took a notebook from her bag and wrote down the phrase. Reading upside down, Cassie saw: “the possibility of being bold, confident, and fun.” Pippa had underlined this twice. She put her notebook away and said, “Why don’t you guys come to dinner on Friday?”

      “Ash is at a conference in Canberra this week,” said Cassie. “How’s Matt?”

      “Good. Hey, listen: George. You know he’s back in Melbourne, right? The latest is his mother’s bought him a warehouse apartment in Fitzroy.”

      “That’s nice.” Cassie wondered if she would have a baby with Ash. She tried to picture the baby’s face—it was beautiful, she knew. If a thirty-five-year-old man didn’t have children, did that mean he didn’t want them or that he would be eager to become a father without delay?

      “Obviously, I didn’t hear that from George,” went on Pippa. “You know how guarded he is. He calls it ‘private.’ But one of my Melbourne mates told me.”

      Cassie stirred herself to ask, “How’s the difficult second novel going?”

      Soon after Pippa and Cassie moved to Sydney and their respective universities, Pippa had become involved with a guy called Vince. When they broke up, Vince would stand outside her house, crying. Pippa called this “stalking”—why couldn’t Vince see that it was over and move on? Dumping Vince was another thing Pippa had known all along that she would do. Cassie wondered what it took to be loved so grandly, so operatically. She helped Pippa load Vince’s paintings into her car; Pippa said she was returning them so that Vince could sell them or reuse the canvases. To fling Vince’s work in his face seemed an ingenious cruelty to Cassie. But when she protested, Pippa said, “The alternative is the paintings go out in the rubbish—or do you want them?” Cassie had to admit that she didn’t. Pippa pulled down her bedroom blind and said, “Vince can cry on demand. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s his party trick.” In that same calm, reasoning tone, she had once told Cassie, “Vince is a brilliant kisser.” Cassie peeped around the edge of the blind and saw Vince in the street, his hair and the trees streaming—the rain, at least, was not any kind of trick. Pippa was quite plain, with no figure to speak of and a mouth crowded with teeth, but Cassie couldn’t persuade herself that any boyfriend of her own would wait in a downpour, without an umbrella, hoping for a glimpse of her. Against her will, it became a standard by which she measured men. Ash wouldn’t do it, she thought, stirring her coffee while Pippa talked about her book. At once she thought of things Ash did do and was shot through with delight. She was almost unnaturally happy that year and she was a girl with a great capacity for joy. When Cassie read of war and suffering and children without enough to eat, she knew that she had no right to happiness and would try to reject the sensation. But it welled up again, natural and persistent, at the sight of clouds chasing each other, or the first wave of scented mock-orange in the street. When that happened, time receded and the world shrank to a rainbow-hung valley that Cassie could frame and keep close. The kelpies vanished and the snakes, and the death-dealing spiders in the toilet. Ash became another version of Cassie’s gentle parents: an older, wiser person whom she scrutinized and loved.

      The Ashfield Tamil said, “Those Indians are selling frozen paneer cheap. But you can be assured that everything I stock is highly fresh.” He was following Cassie around the shop because she could never find what she wanted. This was partly because the shelves were stocked according to an elusive logic—why were the dried chilies beside the tinned ghee rather than with the chili powder?—and partly because Cassie rarely had a specific purchase in mind. When preparing for her Sri Lankan feast, she had shopped according to a list СКАЧАТЬ