Gilgamesh Read online

  Was this the Ada of those letters, witty and rueful, that had once entertained them each Christmas with stories of ‘the bush’? How long had it been since she had last written? Nor was there a trace of the Ada of his earliest memories, a presence around which his mother was always happy, a presence which he remembered as light, playful, sensual.

  Her daughters were such serious girls. Mute, stiff, thin, their hair pinned back and plaited like schoolgirls, their faces childishly bare.

  He reminded himself that they were recently bereaved.

  There were chinks between the rough boards of the walls of the bedroom. The flame of the candle that Frances had set down on a set of shelves twisted and flickered in the draughts. On closer inspection the shelves were made of empty kerosene boxes placed one on top of another. The calico curtain was stamped Dingo Flour. What had he expected? A whitewashed cottage, green fields, flitches of bacon hanging from sturdy rafters? Kangaroos coming to be fed at the back door, wasn’t that what his aunt had written?

  He was appalled by the bareness and roughness, appalled for these poor female relatives of his.

  To hide his shock, and his shivers in the draughty room, he’d made some joke to Frances about snakes under the bed. But she replied seriously that the snakes were hibernating at this time of the year.

  Wise snakes. He was glad of his coat to put over the thin grey blankets. In the other bed Aram already lay sheathed beneath his coat, its sleeves trailing on the floor. Probably asleep. In all the strange beds they had slept in, Aram always slid into an instant, elegant slumber. So quiet you wouldn’t know if he were asleep or thinking in the darkness. Perhaps, thought Leopold, as he tried to stop his coat sliding off from his bulk, adaptability had something to do with being lean. He blew the candle out.

  The bush advanced. A herd of creatures seemed to be moving around the house, chewing and thudding, bumping against the thin walls. The house strained and creaked like a woman in corsets, and something, rats were they? scuttled in the roof. He must tell the girls in the morning. Far away he could hear the crack of the surf. The air was cold. He pulled his scarf out from the pocket of his coat and wrapped it around his ears. He told himself that this visit would be good for his health, like a stay in a sanatorium.

  As he was about to fall asleep he had an image of the younger girl, Edith, leading them to the house. He saw her bounding in and out of the shadows across the clearing, Aram following, while he, tortoise-like, brought up the rear.

  Their door was shut, but there was that foreign smell again as Edith tiptoed past their room. The whole house smelt different. She pulled off the black dress, lay down on one side of her mother. On the other side lay Frances. By her stillness Edith knew she was awake.

  ‘Did they tell you why they’ve come?’

  ‘No. Ssh.’

  The two girls lay for a long time on their backs looking up at the ceiling.

  They said it was a last-minute decision. They had been travelling together through the Middle East. They met some sailors in a restaurant in Aden, who invited them to take a berth on their ship to Australia. They had a little money left, and no immediate obligations, and they said why not. Leopold had always wanted to meet the antipodean branch of the family.

  Ada was still sleeping. They were eating lumpy porridge at the kitchen table. Leopold declared himself bowled over by Australian golden syrup. Steam rose off the clearing in the bright sunshine. The dog thumped its tail, the daughters shyly smiled. They all went to drink their tea sitting on the edge of the verandah and the visitors, as young men always seemed to do, talked about themselves.

  They had met in Iraq, where Leopold was working on an archaeological dig, not far from Baghdad, on the Euphrates. Aram was working for the expedition as a driver. He was Armenian, born in Turkey, where his parents had died when he was very young. He had grown up in an orphanage in Syria. He was driving a taxi in Aleppo when Leopold’s professor hired him to drive the team to the dig. He stayed on. Leopold and he became friends. When the expedition finished they decided to travel. In Aram’s taxi they drove all across Mesopotamia, visiting other sites, ancient cities, Ur, Larsa, Nineveh, Uruk, buried beneath the sands.

  They buried themselves in the ancient world. Because, of course, the whole modern world was about to erupt. That, they said, was what was waiting for them at the end of their travels.

  The girls listened with their bare feet swinging off the verandah. Leopold said that he admired their hardiness, and envied the au naturel mode. He was going to get his feet into training, he declared. He took his shoes off, rolled his trousers up and picked his way up and down the clearing. His stumpy little feet were fishbelly white, like prisoners he said, shut away for years from the light of day. He hobbled, wincing, while Aram and the girls laughed on the verandah.

  It was a long time before Edith understood the gallantry of his performance.

  Hens scratched in a little scrappy orchard. The sky was deep blue. Beyond the moment of their laughter the huge silence of the bush surrounded them. It was going to be all right, Leopold thought.

  Frances and Edith avoided each other’s eye as they laughed at their cousin. Many years ago their Aunt Irina had sent a photograph of herself and Leopold in her Christmas letter. Leopold as a schoolboy. Fat, shiny-cheeked, in long shorts and a striped cap, holding on to a bicycle. How Frances and Edith had loved to laugh at him. Haw haw haw, they laughed, the way the big boys jeered at sissies at school. They pointed out to one another his fat white knees, his straining buttons, his air of stolid cheer. Irina’s letters were always full of news of him, how clever he was (though poor at sports), his prizes, his scholarships to grammar school and university where he studied archaeology.

  In rare moments of unity and out of hearing of their mother, Frances and Edith sometimes played a game called Fat Leopold. This is Fat Leopold running with a wobbly bottom. Fat Leopold flopping round on a horse. Getting stuck on a fence. Talking posh—’Oh I say, poor show old chap.’ Goody-goody Leopold bending over, ripping the seat of his shorts with a farting sound. These games were savage, vengeful and unfair. What had he ever done to them, except to be a boy, doted upon, richer and cleverer than they could ever be, living at the centre of the world instead of its extremity?

  Meanwhile, what did their mother write about them? What could she write? That they attended a one-roomed school where the teacher was boarded with whichever family in the district could offer a bed. The teachers, mostly young, left as soon as possible. That there were times of the year, burning-off or harvest, or if the creeks ran over, when the school was empty. That after Eighth Standard her daughters gave up school, because their father needed help and she, Ada, couldn’t bear to be without them?

  Aunt Irina’s Christmas letter was a ritual of their childhood. It always arrived early. She took no risks with the time it might take to reach them in the wilds of the Australian bush. Each day in early December Ada made a pilgrimage to their mailbox, a kerosene tin hammered to a stump beside the Nunderup road. In the same mailbox Ada would leave her letter to Irina to be collected, with ninepence for the stamps.

  Irina’s letter was Christmas for Ada. She used to wave it as she walked home across the clearing, through the yellow summer grass. She read it without moving on the verandah, her daughters hanging over her shoulders. Irina’s racing black script looked like a voice in a foreign language, all rapid with waving hands. For many hours their mother would say nothing, just pace, in a trance. Over the days she would read it to them. It was ordinary enough, the ice on the pond, the feuds at Church, her success at cards. The queues of the unemployed. How hard it was for a widow to make ends meet (she always wrote that). What Leopold achieved.

  But for some years now their mother had not seemed interested in Irina’s letters. She would read a few lines and lie down on the couch. When they asked her what the news was, she said ‘The usual’ and turned away her head. Irina’s last letters had remained unopened.

  When their fath
er died, the girls had asked each other whether they should write and tell Irina.

  ‘Mumma will, when she is better,’ Frances said.

  Even though it had been many years now since Ada had sat flushed and determined at the kitchen table, swatting at early summer flies, penning her letter, laughing softly to herself.

  Reg Tehoe paid for the funeral and attended himself. Dr Bly sent apologies, he’d been called to an urgent case. A few farmers, old settlers who were still in the district, came back to the house afterwards and their wives brought scones and cakes. The women helped Frances and Edith to pour the tea. Ada stayed in bed throughout. The women exchanged looks. She couldn’t take the life. They ran their fingers over surfaces, clicked their tongues. The men strolled around the clearing in their Sunday suits and pointed out to one another how run-down everything was. ‘Poor old Clarkie,’ they said, ‘he never had any luck.’ They offered the girls help, but Frances and Edith said they could cope. The women kissed them and the men touched their hats. Nobody expected them to last.

  The girls became preoccupied with looking after Ada. She never seemed to come back into her life. She left little piles of kindling on the steps, shifted the lids on the pots, like mementoes of old tasks. Because she could not seem to concentrate on the food in front of her, they started helping her to eat. They started helping her to dress. On the first warm day after their father’s death they sat her on the edge of the verandah and washed her long black hair.

  They did not speak of her condition, it seemed disloyal. They supposed that it would pass. They expected that one day, one of the spring days she loved, she would wake up and be her old self again. Besides, what else was there for them to do? They had always looked after their mother.

  The summer after their father died was endless. A haze lay over the bush. The fruit trees, unpruned, shrivelled up in the orchard. Some tattered female rags were flung to bleach over bushes. Ada trailed around the clearing, her hair down her back, calling the chooks in, the one job she loved. The two girls were sitting on the verandah one afternoon when a groundsman from the Sea House appeared. He offered to plough the firebreaks around the clearing. Their place was a danger to other property, he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ chorused the sisters and heard their voices, young and shrill, echoing across the clearing.

  They didn’t speak of this incident, as they never spoke of anything of importance to each other. But each was shocked. What had happened to them? They had been close to drifting back to Nature, like their mother and the house and clearing. They had stopped talking, they had almost stopped thinking. It was obvious that action was called for. But what?

  The next day Madge Tehoe left a message in their mailbox, offering one of them a job as a waitress. She called it ‘summer help’.

  ‘Dad wouldn’t like it,’ said Frances. He had called Madge ‘The Lady of the Manor’.

  So it was Edith who went.

  The visitors liked to escort Edith to or from her shifts at the Sea House. She noticed that there was always a competition between them, about who was first or best or right. Aram was stronger and more deft, Leopold had more knowledge. At the same time the competition was a joke, and the real loser was the one who took it seriously. They teased and jostled each other all along the track.

  She wondered if Leopold ever ran out of things to say. He was capable of discussing every moment of the day as it passed. Odd things made him curious. ‘Could you walk this track blindfold, Edith?’ or ‘What does it take to know a piece of land?’ He listened carefully to her answers. Before he came it was as if she’d never learnt to speak.

  They made themselves at home at the Sea House, playing tennis or reading the newspapers left in the deckchairs. At night they drank beer in the bar with the locals, and played pool with the guests. Sometimes they were invited to make a bridge four with the Tehoes. Aram was very quick at cards. One night Leopold came home alone with Edith, leaving Aram to finish a particularly intense game of two-handed rummy with Madge.

  Edith in cap and apron served the Sunday roast while, outside, her visitors’ tennis ball bounced like a popping cork. She could hear Leopold calling out scores in the best Wimbledon manner. They bobbed in and out of vision through the diamond-shaped window panes. Edith dropped a potato she was serving, the way she had been trained, between a spoon and fork. Of course at that moment Madge Tehoe swept past.

  ‘Eyes on the job, please, Edith. You can’t afford to be a lady of leisure, I’m afraid.’

  Later as Edith was washing up Madge dumped a large stale sponge cake onto her tray.

  ‘For your guests’ tea. You might like to make a trifle or something.’ She was strolling outside to the sunshine, carrying a book and a cream straw hat and a frosted glass.

  As Edith set off home across the lawn, the cake wrapped in her apron, she heard Madge’s voice rising up from the depths of a deckchair. ‘Of course, Reg could never live in the city. He’s a countryman through and through.’ Edith could see her legs crossed in shiny brown stockings, and cigarette smoke coiling up from beneath the brim of her hat.

  ‘Edith! Don’t think you can steal away like that!’ Leopold suddenly sprang up from the deckchair next to Madge. Then Aram popped up next to him and, folding the Sea House newspapers, they took their leave of Madge with hasty little bows.

  Down the garden stairway they swept, one on either side of her. ‘Good afternoon,’ they said, bowing to the guests they met. The men had to salute back to them, and raise their hats to Edith in her black servant’s dress.

  ‘What is this?’ Aram fingered Edith’s parcel.

  ‘It’s a cake. Mrs Tehoe gave it to me.’

  Aram unwrapped it.

  ‘A little past its prime, wouldn’t you say?’ Leopold said. Aram picked it up and spun it straight into the arms of a nearby laurel bush.

  Edith was too shocked to speak. Waste, the worst of sins. At the very least they could have fed it to the chooks. And what if somebody told Madge?

  Then suddenly she started laughing, and waving her apron, she ran lightly down the steps.

  ‘When are you and Frances going to join us at tennis?’ Leopold said when he caught up with her. ‘Then we can play mixed doubles.’

  ‘We don’t know how to.’

  ‘I will teach you,’ Aram said.

  Edith said nothing. For a start, she was a Clark, she was help and you didn’t see help on the courts. She hoped they would take her silence for a lack of interest. Because of course in the end it was always a matter of shoe leather. She and Frances shared one pair of shoes.

  Madge informed Edith that since the May holidays were upon them, facilities were now reserved for guests only. ‘Summer is over,’ she said. Her cheeks each bore a spot of rouge as if already bitten by winter frosts. She looked down at Edith, haughty, swathed in a mohair shawl.

  The visitors still sometimes waited for Edith after a night shift, smoking and talking in the little bar. One night they arranged a ride to Bunbury with genial Reg in the Rover the next morning. They came home late and a little drunk from their excursion, swinging sugar sacks from their shoulders. They had bought bacon, raisins, port wine, bananas, rice and lentils, flour, oil, cinnamon and cloves. Chocolates for the girls, and for Ada a pair of lambskin slippers.

  The girls had never seen men cook before. Leopold was patient, stirring and tasting, his podgy hands strangely delicate. Aram was quick and precise. He made Armenian bread, yeastless loaves flat and round as plates. He made rice spiced with lemon, lentils stewed in oil, vegetables charred over the stove. Leopold made omelettes, bacon sandwiches, beetroot soup called borsch, coq au vin. Aram selected the hen and wrung its neck when Ada was asleep. But after it had spent the afternoon stewing in the iron pot, she sucked its bones along with the rest of them, wiped its juices up with bread.

  Each meal Edith had to restrain herself from licking her fingers, holding out her plate for second helpings. She could feel herself growing. She ate as if at any moment th
is food would be taken away from her and there would be no more.

  The visitors changed. They rarely left the clearing, except for walks. Like the women of the house they went early to bed and slept away the cold dark rattling nights. In the bright mornings they splashed themselves with water from the tank by the verandah, shouting with pain, and shaved in a little mirror they’d nailed onto the verandah post. They chopped firewood, comparing biceps, and proclaimed that rural life was developing their strength.

  They liked to sit on the verandah, smoking and talking in the autumn sun with the girls. Leopold was fascinated by Group Settlement. Was it a socialist experiment? And if not, had it fulfilled its capitalist aims? Had the failed settlers been radicalised after their treatment by the government? And were there native peoples that the experiment had displaced?

  The girls didn’t know. They had never thought of these questions, in fact they did not really understand their terms. Frances blushed and licked her lips, trying to find words. ‘Our father was too busy to worry about politics,’ she said. ‘And we’ve hardly ever seen natives here.’

  But she sounded uneasy. For, Edith thought, wasn’t everything their father did in some way against, the government, the city, the upper classes? The angry way he used to rattle the pages of the newspaper … was that political? And didn’t she, didn’t all of them sense something in the bush, a presence they didn’t understand? That made them suspect they didn’t really know this land at all. Was this what made Ada so afraid?