The Life to Come. Michelle De Kretser

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СКАЧАТЬ in retaliation.”

      “You know there’s no actual historical record of a massacre, Mum.”

      “My husband’s grandfather was alive when I first came here,” said Margaret to Ash. “He told me all about it. It was spoken about openly when he was a boy. Mind you, I always thought there was Aboriginal blood in my husband’s family. You’ve only to look at Lachlan.”

      Ash looked at Lachlan: milk and ginger, sanitary blue eyes.

      Standing behind his mother, Lachlan tapped the side of his head. He opened the fridge and peered inside, saying, “Is it too early for a beer? Do you want one, Ash?”

      “I think that’s what my old woman comes to tell me. You can say she’s a dream. But another word for a dream that recurs is ‘truth.’”

      “Bob still hard at it?” asked Lachlan, pulling the ring off a can. He told Ash, “There’s a downward spiral of genetic selection on most family farms. The smart kid goes away, the dumb one stays home and manages the property. Luckily, it happened the other way around with us.”

      Margaret said, “This kitchen was the front room in the original homestead. If you go over to that window and look out, you’ll see Bob’s office. Of course, the gun slits are on the other side.”

      Ash felt obliged to comply. A low building with a hipped roof stood across the yard. The old glass in the kitchen window was faintly rippled. The child who had appeared at Ash’s door strolled across this cockeyed view. Ash saw Margaret at ten: the straight hair chopped off at the tips of the ears, the triangular face. The eyes were different: not the grandmother’s hooded blue but a shallow, creaturely yellow. They looked directly at Ash. The child was holding something—an apple? an iced bun? a cricket ball?—that Ash couldn’t quite identify. It displayed a semicircular white scar. Ash thought that he had never seen anything as unnerving as the conjunction of that mauled missile and the small brown hand.

      After dinner, Lachlan came to Ash’s bedroom to take away his tray. He said, “I can remember when it became fashionable to have a convict in the family tree. All the amateur genealogists hoped to find one. Now you get people who dream up an Aboriginal ancestor. Is it progress? Or another kind of stealing to persuade ourselves we’re legit?”

      They were driving back through the not-landscape when Ash saw the wardrobe from his room. It stood in a paddock, upright and empirical and empty: a survivor. What was horrible was that the wardrobe was the Ashfield Tamil. No one else knew this, only Ash, and he was not allowed to tell. He woke to a delirious magpie and a distant shout: “Man up, Stevie!” That would be Bob, calling encouragement to her daughter or her dog.

      The first thing Ash had bought in Sydney was a heater. Three or four times a week, Cassie and Ash would have dinner in a restaurant before going back to Ash’s warm flat. There was a smell there—also detectable on the stairs—that was very strong in the built-in cupboards: a musty smell, but pleasant, like old apples and loam. Ash and Cassie would drink vodka in bed, tell jokes, show off a little to each other. These hours were dedicated to the business of bodies but strayed easily into myth. The flat became their castle, the city was transformed into a forest, the preserve of bears; a stranger arrived with urgent messages from the emperor and was turned away at the gate. At different moments of their affair, each of them felt it: the sense of timelessness and fate that underwrites old tales.

      In the morning, Cassie liked to climb the stair to the tower. She claimed it was for the view, trying to conceal her fascination with the room: the books, the journals, the printouts, the piles of student essays. The framed Constructivist prints on the wall were of no interest, as they belonged to the old professor. On Ash’s desk, an upturned lid held paper clips and a staple remover. Cassie swiveled slowly on an ergonomic chair. There was something here that held the key to Ash—something more intimate and revealing than the mouth guard he wore to keep from grinding his teeth in his sleep. She carried a book stuck with markers downstairs. “Why are some of the Post-its yellow and others orange?” she asked.

      “I ran out of yellow ones,” said Ash, just out of the shower.

      At that moment Cassie came close to seeing that he was only an instrument in her quest, which was really for a system and an answer. How was she to live? The riddle was crucial and therefore hard to unlock. She believed that Ash had it under control—this had to do with the white split of his grin.

      Spring came like a wind in sudden warm gusts. Underneath the air remained cool. “The bottom of the air is fresh,” said Ash, remembering a phrase acquired on a school trip to France. How pleasing to find life fitting itself so smoothly to words! On a hot October Sunday, he brunched beside the ocean—its pomp and flash!—and risked a swim at Coogee; the sunny Pacific, too, harbored cold depths.

      With the improvement in the weather came evenings when Ash walked up the hill to Cassie’s place in Glebe. But drafts and chilly lino weren’t all that he had to contend with there. Cassie rented two second-story rooms at the back of a Victorian house. One of them was really a wide balcony that had been enclosed to make a sunroom. That was where Cassie and Ash ate, on mismatched chairs at a table by a row of clear-paned louvres that sliced up the view. The sunroom was Cassie’s study: her laptop was always open on the table, beside a pile of books. When Cassie served a meal, she never bothered to clear the table, but simply pushed the paraphernalia of work to one side. The resulting juxtaposition of food and books worked on Ash like a stray lash floating in an eye. One day Cassie had left a hefty volume propped spine-up like a tent. Ash hadn’t treated a book like that since the age of seven. Coming upon it, his father had shouted, “You will break its spine!” as if Ash were torturing a kitten. His father’s anger was always connected to the idea of waste. It could be traced to an austere past when a light shining in an empty room was a bill mounting up, books were for the lucky, and no one left anything on their plate. His father would often remark that when he was a boy, whatever food there was in the house was kept locked up—once it was half a packet of biscuits.

      Cassie usually made pasta and a salad for dinner, but one evening she produced a feast. A recessed space at the top of the interior staircase had been fitted out as a kitchen that Cassie shared with the other tenant. She went to and fro between this dingy nook and the sunroom, returning twice with a laden tray. She laughed at Ash’s amazement—she had been cooking for days, she said. Surely, thought Ash, it would have been a simple matter to clear the table first? Vegetable curries, a bowl of dhal, an array of pickles and glutinous chutneys encroached on the streamlined laptop, the right-angled books—they threatened knowledge with stickiness and slop. Ash wouldn’t allow himself to remark on this; he believed in the separation of powers. He had intense, almost violent feelings about Cassie’s body, which he entered every few days. But he wouldn’t ask her to tidy her table, or make a move to clear it himself—he would not be masculinist or proprietorial. And it had to be said that the change from pasta to lentils and vegetables was a relief. It was obvious that Cassie could eat whatever she wanted without affecting the hollows under her hip bones, but Ash had begun to count calories of late. When he had first seen his baby sister, Ash had fleetingly wondered how many more siblings there would be. His stepmother was still in her thirties and had hips like a Soviet peasant—a Soviet peasant was what she had been born, after all. Ash saw his inheritance dwindle with the appearance of each new little Fernando: he envisaged a procession of them, all with serene, Madonna faces and backsides like sideboards. The baby couldn’t possibly have guessed what was on Ash’s mind but began to scream anyway. She was twelve now, and Ash’s inalienable paternal inheritance had finally come down to him intact: the makings of a potbelly.

      When his plate was empty, Ash said, “Wow! That was absolutely delicious!”

      “Have more—there’s heaps.”

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