The Life to Come. Michelle De Kretser

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СКАЧАТЬ around. It said so much about his parents: for a start, the invasive way his father played records full blast so that he could hear them no matter where he was in the house. And why hadn’t his mother turned down the volume before answering the phone? Think first! George wanted to shout. She often remarked that women of her generation had been deceived. He knew that this meant “I was deceived.” It was her way of alluding to his father’s girlfriends. She had left when she could no longer ignore them; the latest one had turned up on Christmas morning with a present for George. But the reason George and his mother ended up in Melbourne was a man she had met at a party. He lasted two years, just long enough for her divorce to come through, then scampered home to his wife.

      Pippa produced a dish of bananas prepared with turmeric and cream. That was the evening two boys came to the door in search of the old man. They looked like teenage real estate agents, with ties and short, waxed hair, but suggested melodrama because they arrived during a storm. Lightning turned the sky biblical behind them. For a blazing, vertiginous instant, the iron veranda post was a cross. The boys shouted at each other in Vietnamese, over the downpour, and everyone shouted in English. At last, George wrote down the address of the nursing home, and the boys plunged back into the rain.

      It rained for three days. George went on with his novel at night. The river rose, ran across the road, and stopped the cars. Long after the sun came back, and the traffic resumed, the path beside the river stayed treacherous with mud. George slept naked in the swampy afternoons; there was air-conditioning in the rooms upstairs. Pippa wore shorts and a lime-green bikini top; she was pretty much flat-chested. She rubbed ice cubes on her wrists and went barefoot on the tiles. George noticed her feet again. They were nuggety and rectangular, like a young child’s feet—even the sparkly turquoise nail polish belonged to a child. He wondered if Pippa bothered with right and left shoes.

      George’s father taught computer science at a technical college on the North Shore. Two or three times a year, he met up with his son over a drink in the city; what followed was a conversation between strangers. George had left his new number on his father’s answering machine, but it was his mother who called. She was in Lausanne, where an expert had declared that the Bonnard was a fake. “A good fake, mind you,” said George’s mother. He could hear her breathing in Switzerland. “I guess I’ll be hanging on to the day job for a while.”

      The phone often rang. George took down messages from Pippa’s friends. The friends dropped in. They stayed for meals. George and Pippa moved a table out to the strip of concrete that passed for a yard. They strung fairy lights over the back door, and set the table with blue-and-white plates; Pippa had found a cupboard full of old china. “I love pretty plates,” she said, giving them a wipe with a tea towel. She asked if George was sure he wouldn’t change his mind about dinner. George said again that he really needed to work.

      One night, he stretched his arms, cracked his spine, left his desk. Standing on the loggia, he identified Katrina: her voice floated up, describing the mole between her breasts. He had retained a distinct mental image of her breasts, George discovered. As a change from Thai, Pippa was serving prawns with lemon juice, brown bread and butter. George had seen her tip the prawn heads into the bin—they would stink like anything for the rest of the week.

      He was returning from his walk one morning when eggs for breakfast passed from an idea into a need. He went up to the shop on Illawarra Road. The eggs had just hit the pan when Pippa came into the kitchen; there were tiny grains of sleep in the corners of her eyes. George watched her arrange the remaining eggs in a green majolica dish. She picked up the empty carton. “These are cage,” she said. “You should get free-range.”

      George replied that free-range chickens, too, were killed.

      “But there’s no unnecessary suffering.”

      George picked up a metal spatula. He almost said, Ah! So that’s OK, then. He said nothing: he had remembered, just in time, that he was talking to someone whose idea of ethics was a dinner party. Besides, his eggs had started to brown.

      In February, a heat wave struck. The air-conditioning gave out. At night, after Pippa came home from the dinner shift, George would light mosquito coils and a lantern. They sat on the loggia drinking mojitos; Katrina and her boyfriend had left a present of a bottle of rum. George asked one or two questions about Katrina. There was room for a character like her—a minor figure—in his novel.

      Pippa said, “That’s a relationship where the names say it all.” George looked at her. Her eyes were bright with dislike. “The Kat and the Matt,” said Pippa. There was mint and sugar on her breath.

      On one of the mojito nights, the inevitable happened: Pippa grew confessional. She wanted to be a writer, she told George. When she got back from overseas, she intended to enroll in a creative writing course. George thought back to her essays: a stew of passionate opinion, mangled argument, atrocities of usage and grammar; that Credit had been the purest largesse on his part. He remembered her hanging back one day, as the other students were dispersing, to say, “I love English.”

      “In that case, I suggest you learn to write it,” answered George.

      Pippa was talking about her travels now: they were to provide her with raw material, experiences. George, whose novel was set in Heidelberg, where he had spent a day at the age of nineteen, said that literature and the world were two different things. Pippa grappled with this, slitting her eyes. She said, “You mean, look in thy heart and write?” George meant nothing of the kind: girls like Pippa understood “heart” as a license to gush. But coming from her, the quotation so astonished him that he merely grunted. He divided what was left of the cocktail between them, and ran his finger around the rim of the jug.

      They were eating strawberries; Pippa had brought a big, soft bag of them home from work. Passing along the loggia the next morning, George saw a cut-glass bowl of miniature Father Christmases. Overnight, each berry had grown a moldy white beard.

      Day and night, bushfires burned in the mountains. Sitting out on the loggia, George and Pippa could smell the smoke. But there was no longer the high, intolerable sound of barking: Pippa had persuaded Rhiannon to give her a key. Bruce tore up and down the yard, chasing the ball Pippa threw for him; he slept, content and exhausted, for hours. Sometimes she sneaked the dog out and took him for a walk along the river. She invited George to go with them, but he explained that he was allergic to pets. He was conscious of a fresh danger: Rhiannon’s landlord wanted his house back, and she was having difficulty finding a rental place that would let her keep a dog. It looked as if she might have to return Bruce to the pound. The way Pippa relayed all this, George got the distinct impression that she was putting out feelers. So when she said, “I thought it was cats people were allergic to?” he answered firmly, “Dogs, too.” There was no point raising anyone’s hopes.

      Autumn came, and George’s father died. A classic end, a cliché, really: lobbing a ball into a net one minute, a massive coronary the next. He was between girlfriends, as it turned out, so it fell to George to pack up his flat.

      The flat was only a couple of streets away from the Meshaws’ old house. George hadn’t been in that part of Paddington for twenty-three years. The last time he saw his father, they had eaten big, juicy kangaroo steaks—George remembered the blood slobbering out across their plates. Running lightly up the stairs, he dreaded entering the flat. But it was as impersonal as a showroom. His father had never been a hoarder; even the piano seat held only a cardboard wallet filled with dull documents. One of them was a birth certificate. George knew and always forgot that Meshaw wasn’t his father’s real name. Syllables had been trimmed, vowels altered, consonants suppressed to create something that could fit into Australian mouths. His father was a product of the old world, and his vices, like his virtues, had been old-fashioned: wine, women, music, an unshakable faith in the rational mind.

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