The Life to Come. Michelle De Kretser
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Название: The Life to Come

Автор: Michelle De Kretser

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Зарубежная классика

Серия:

isbn: 9781936787838

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СКАЧАТЬ had been a packet of condoms beside the bed—but at last he looked inside. The envelope held twenty or so Polaroids. They were photographs of George’s mother, angled, arty shots, many of them out of focus—one showed only a blurry fan of fingers. George crouched, moved his hand, spread the images over the floor. The instant before he examined the last one, he already knew what he would see: his mother, bending forward from the waist, a wavy cord trailing to the phone. Everything in the photo was exactly as George had remembered—the orange wall, his mother’s bright, dark-centered hair—although the image had taken on a brownish yellow tinge. What memory had blanked from the scene was his father’s presence: he must have been there, in that room full of jazz, aiming the camera at his wife. The pieces in the puzzle of George’s parents shifted, acquired new angles. All the Polaroids showed that yellow discoloration; the chemicals were breaking down from exposure to light. George pictured his father handling the photos, laying them out like data along the lid of the piano. He studied the images again: unstable proofs of tenderness, the only photos in the flat.

      That evening, he called his mother. She hadn’t come up for the funeral, merely saying, “I’m sorry for your loss.” George told her about finding the Polaroids. What he was really saying was, Do you understand now? Admit you were wrong to leave him! He started to describe the photo with the phone and the orange wall.

      His mother cut him short, saying that she remembered the picture. “The one where you can see my roots have grown out? It’s so typical of your father to have kept that. I never liked it—I didn’t like you poking that camera at me ever.”

      “Wait,” said George. “I took that picture?”

      “All of them. Don’t you remember?” She said, “An idiot girl gave you a Polaroid camera. It became your favorite thing. You loved watching the colors change as the image developed. When you ran out of film a second time, your father told you the camera was broken. He knew that seeing you with it upset me.”

      With the change of season, it was cool at night. George stood on the loggia, inspecting the loose shapes of trees. There was only ugly furniture around him and big, tiled, silent rooms. Pippa was living in Stanmore, in a house with Katrina. Bruce was barking—he had been barking for hours; Rhiannon must have talked her way into staying on, after all. George had just finished the first draft of his novel. It was called Necessary Suffering. At least for now; that was one of the things George wanted to think about. But first he had to put together the puzzle of his parents. Sometimes the reason his father saved the Polaroids was George’s mother and sometimes it was George—sometimes even the idiot girl was involved. George’s brain wouldn’t stop showing him the photo with the telephone. He saw his mother folded in two with her back to the wall. Something like a smudge kept dancing on the edge of his mind. To study it calmly, George turned it into a sentence written out in black on the white frame of the Polaroid: “Maybe she was trying to get away from me.”

      The sun rose over the misty park: an autumn sun, a flat red disk that had strayed from a Japanese print. Later that day, George closed the door of his father’s flat for the last time and went for a walk. It was a bright afternoon, but the street where the Meshaws had lived was black with shadows. Tall plane trees arched over it; the leaves remained thick overhead but were starting to change color and fall. George saw what he had known, what he had forgotten: the row of houses, with their wooden balconies, looked into the face of a sandstone escarpment. He came to a gate where he had stood on a summer morning: looking back at the house where he had always lived, looking out at the waiting taxi. The escarpment and the trees kept the sun from the street. What was coming was a life in which his father was a stranger. George looked from his father, barefoot on the veranda, to his mother, sitting in the taxi with her face turned away. Who was the cat and who was the mat? George’s father said, “If you stop crying, you can keep anything that falls out of my pockets.” Then he stood on his hands.

      CASSIE SPOTTED THE SPICE MART because she was on the lookout for a South Asian grocery. At the launch of their university’s Centre for Australian Literature, Ash had expressed his disappointment with a Sri Lankan restaurant where he had recently dined. The dhal had proved particularly unsatisfying, said Ash. It was thin and sour, nothing like the comforting curried lentils, velvety with coconut milk, that he had eaten as a child.

      Ash—as Ashoka preferred to be known—mentioned the dhal because he had noticed that women were moved by references to that aspect of his past. When they learned that he had lived in Sri Lanka as a child, they pictured him in a tropical garden where fruit fell to the hand, too innocent to divine the vicious historical turn that would soon cast him on the grudging benevolence of the West. This satisfying nonsense simplified everything, clearing factual clutter to reveal the way forward. Now whatever needed to happen next could happen.

      It had been explained to Ash that the government funded the Centre for Australian Literature after a ministerial survey of humanities graduates found that 86 percent of English majors had never read an Australian book. Asked to name a contemporary Australian novelist, responses were more or less equally divided between “that Oscar and Louise guy” and Stephen King. Most declined to “Name a novel by Patrick White,” although one student recalled Riders on the Storm. These results were welcome: they could be blamed on the ousted Labor government.

      Predictably, the national broadcaster—a viper’s nest of socialists, tree huggers, and ugly, barren females—had seized on the survey, exhuming one of its bleeding-heart ideologues to moan about funding cuts to education. The flagrant bias of the national broadcaster was a gift to the government’s spin doctors, but the survey struck an unexpected chord with the right-wing press. “Aussie Heritage Lost to Multiculturalism” (broadsheet) was backed up by “Our Classroom Shame” (tabloid). At this warning shot from its chief ally, the government acted decisively, and the Centre for Australian Literature opened after just five years.

      At the launch, Cassie watched the men whose speeches followed one another. She was in the first year of her doctoral candidature. Leanne, her supervisor, was the inaugural director of the Centre, but Cassie saw that Leanne was of no account. The Aboriginal elder whose customary welcome had opened the ceremony was equally beside the point. These two were required by protocol but only got in the way, like a debutante’s white gloves. The men on the podium had smooth or corrugated faces, they tolerated the symbolism of women and Aboriginal people, and they were in charge. Their various speeches came down to one: “Do not imagine we wouldn’t crush you if we chose.” Cassie had been brought up to believe that the world these men inhabited—the rage and spite and cruelty that were its grim, medieval furnishings—had been swept away. Now and then, the realization that it had not swam blackly before her like a frightening malfunction of vision.

      While she listened, Cassie went on eating, having edged her way to the buffet as soon as the speeches began. She was a bony girl who was always hungry. As a child, she had craved white bread, and thin slices of dried sausage spread with mustard, and dark plum jam in which you could stand a spoon. All these things, which Cassie was fed by her grandmother, were banned at home. At home there was nourishing sugarless cake, and soybean casseroles in which tomato skins floated. From the mud-brick house in a valley up north, where two kelpies had succumbed to snakebite, Cassie fled during the holidays to Sydney and her grandmother’s flat: to plate-glass windows and Schubert, to creamy veal and embroidered tablecloths, to a toilet with no spiders and no scary notice about blockages taped to the wall. Oh, the wonderful, modern pleasure of a toilet that flushed!

      The minister for education said, “I like to begin every day, the pressures of public office permitting, by dipping into one of our world-class Australian writers.” He misquoted a line of Henry Lawson and beamed. The mistake was spotted only by the Lawson specialist, an alcoholic, who by that stage of the evening was incapable of speech. Education being a trivial portfolio, the minister, a golden boy, had also been entrusted with immigration. “Young people are the СКАЧАТЬ