Gilgamesh Page 5

  What you must understand, he said, is that more than a million Armenians were slaughtered in the Turkish Massacres, and nobody came to their aid.

  For Armenians to be strong they must have a strong homeland. They must be prepared to fight for their independence.

  He was not familiar to her now, but a sombre foreign man. The weeks he’d spent here were not important to him, she saw that now. All this time he’d really been thinking of something else.

  The sun had disappeared behind bruise-coloured clouds. It was hushed, about to pour again. He kissed her on the forehead and took her hand. They set off down the track, silent as if returning from a ceremony. By the time they reached the clearing it was dark with rain. There was a round white blur in the kitchen window. Leopold was watching out for them.

  On their last night in Nunderup there was a dance in the Hall. Leopold and Aram saw the poster in the Sea House bar. Frances said their family never went to those things, thanks, she would stay with her mother. But Edith, who these days seemed as detached and free as a traveller herself, said why not? She wound her plaits into a crown on top of her head. She wore the shoes. She didn’t need anything else.

  Leopold started to feel uneasy as they approached the hall. How many weeks had he been shut away from the world? In the yard were trucks, utilities, buggies, spilling children. Horses stamped and tossed together beneath the peppermint trees. At the steps of the porch, blending into the darkness, a crowd of young men, farmers’ sons, were handing round a bottle, their faces following Edith as they stood back to let her pass. He knew from talking to Reg that the lads were penniless, the land could not support them and in the cities there were no jobs. They were waiting for something to happen. War. He could hear muted whistles, murmured jeers.

  The hall was lit by hurricane lamps. Couples of all ages shuffled through sawdust strewn across the floor. On the stage a woman in a hat was thumping out The Pride of Erin on a piano, her hands firm and capable as if she were kneading bread. An old man in a bow tie timidly dabbed at some drums. The clarinetist had paused to tip the spit out of his instrument. Aram and Edith slipped into the circle of dancers like swimmers into a river. Children threaded their way between the couples, or sat on the edge of the stage.

  Between dances the men and women parted ways. By the door was a table with jugs of beer where the men stood talking. Farmers in oldfashioned high-buttoned jackets, necks too strong for ties, faces toughened and reddened, prematurely old. Frank Clark would have looked like this, Leopold thought. But nowhere could he see a woman like Ada. The women gathered round the trestle tables where a supper was being laid, rows of mugs, sandwiches and cakes. The cream cakes looked especially good. All the women helped. Country women. The girls had shy healthy faces, walked round-shouldered and rollicking, like boys. One hitched up a stocking as she crossed the room. The older women talked with arms crossed, chins tucked into weatherbeaten necks. Mouths pressed together, a dry twist to their eyebrows. Indicated those they talked of with a nod of their heads.

  Nods came their way. Not only at the Clarks’ visitors in their black suits, but at the little Clark girl, looking up at Aram, beneath her crown of hair.

  A strange terror struck Leopold as the piano thumped and the couples swept past him. He was back in the bleakness, the menace of the dream on the road when he first came here. He was watching his own fate. He felt breathless. Why had he come to this event? He had wanted to see a little more of these people before he left their country forever, hear their music, see the men and women together.

  But in this dream everybody looked hardened and narrow-minded, xenophobic, graceless to the point of denial of all beauty. There is no romance in this country.

  ‘Are you ready to go home?’ he whispered to Aram and Edith, as he mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. But they shook their heads, smiling kindly at him. As they danced away, Edith had her arm curved around Aram’s shoulder, the way a woman’s arms curve to hold. Too late, too late! He couldn’t stay here a minute longer. He waved to them, pocketed his handkerchief and left.

  He lay on his bed in the darkness, waiting for them.

  When he and Aram joked together they called each other brother, in the Arab way. Brother, everything I have is yours. Language, knowledge, shaving water. Family hospitality. Beautiful cousins. Trust me, brother.

  He thought of little Edith, leggy, shining eyed, her country girl independence, her heartbreaking adoration. Who would not want to touch her? Or did he see her too through Aram’s eyes?

  He felt an ache of possessiveness, he wasn’t sure for whom.

  He was the fat man peering through windows, Aram the man of action. Together they made a whole man, or so they used to joke.

  What did he really know of Aram?

  He only knew him as a traveller. Who took what he needed but needed little. Water, a bedroll, tobacco. The occasional woman. Wheeling off into a lit doorway, a little private coolness between them afterwards. That was the one thing they didn’t share.

  He travelled light, like a warrior. He didn’t take what he couldn’t carry.

  Leopold heard the dog pattering a welcome on the verandah. The back door creaked open. A whisper, a long silence. Their breath, raw and vivid, filled the house.

  Up through the Honeymoon Gardens rushes Edith, dwarfed inside her father’s oilskin cape. The lawns are awash with strips of bark like pink-brown flesh ripped from the eucalypts by winter squalls. No guests wander in this washed-out twilight. Inside the back hall she hangs up the cape, wipes her feet on the inside hem of her dress, puts on her shoes. She glides into the dining room with her eyes down, like a nun who musn’t be tempted by all she can’t have—roasted meat, curls of butter, treacle tart. But from the moment she enters she keeps her eye out for scraps to slip into her pocket, because if there are too few guests Madge will send her home straightaway.

  Everything has gone back to how it was.

  ‘I have been very patient,’ Madge Tehoe says. ‘But I hope you’ll be able to keep your mind on the job now your visitors have gone.’ She has reverted to the amused tone she seems to keep just for Edith, as for a naughty child whose innocent front doesn’t fool her for a moment. She tells Edith she has decided that she will keep her on during winter, as if Edith has begged her for this privilege. In fact Edith knows that the relentless rain and wind make city waitresses moody and nervous as horses, make them suddenly remember urgent family business and pack in time for the next bus out. And that she, silent Edith, farmgirl Edith, moves quickly and can think for herself. Besides, she can’t leave, she has nowhere else to go.

  Edith files away Madge’s words and tone to imitate to Aram and Leopold. They love Madge stories. She knows that far from her mind now being cleared, a blank space for Madge’s bidding, it has never been so occupied. Because she’s having a sort of conversation with the visitors all the time in her head.

  She feels their eyes on her, as if they’re peering in through the diamond-shaped panes, watching her serve. They watch her mop up the water that the bishop has spilt, the very important Bishop of the South West with a napkin tucked into his dog collar as he gnaws on a drumstick. Madge apologises to him for Edith’s carelessness, and nobody bothers to protest that the jug slipped out of the bishop’s greasy fingers as he reached to take it, not even the man of God himself. Shameless Madge doesn’t acknowledge her treachery by so much as a wink. But Edith can hear Leopold’s voice. What does it matter? You’re not going to be here forever … Their voices seem real, the rest of the world is dreamlike. Or rather, she feels like a visitor herself here now, a citizen from some far-off, superior country.

  They’re with her whenever she’s outside. She can hear their quick voices, sense the density of their bodies beside her. She still makes room for them on the track. But now at last she’s telling the stories, her voice strong and certain, telling them everything, speaking her mind. She almost enjoys them more now than she did when they were here in the flesh!

&nbs
p; Strange that it’s always the three of them. She inhabits the early, happier days of the visit, the perilous, lighthearted energy between two men and a woman.

  Sometimes a moment opens and she sees that she is muttering alone on a dark track, her smile glittering and frozen, frozen in time, back to a moment of eternal youth. She gasps and the moment closes. She’s afraid. She’s afraid she will go mad.

  She can’t remember Aram’s face.

  One night she runs into the bar to buy some cigarettes for a guest, and on impulse, in that smoky, masculine atmosphere, buys herself a packet of Capstans, ten for sixpence, and slips it in her pocket. What a comfort this little packet is, like a piece of the past. For weeks she had seen these blue and white packets everywhere, lying on the kitchen table, peeping out of a shirt pocket, crumpled empty in the fire. After work she lights up in the darkness of the Sea House porch. The smoke fills her head, she coughs, but she can hear them cheer and egg her on, and she puffs again, she’s going to get the hang of this. Who would know if they saw her shivering and coughing out there alone that she does it for the company?

  Smoking marks the change in her. Everything about her feels different.

  Not at home though. There the silence signals the visitors’ absence minute by minute. Only the sound of chewing and swallowing, the winter coughs, the moans of sleep. The house seems darker as if the men’s bodies had given off light. Ada knows that something is missing, she won’t take her hat off inside or out, she paces up and down the verandah as if she is waiting to leave. Frances still sleeps with her. Edith sleeps in her old room, in either bed, alternate nights. She can’t bear to wash the sheets.

  Nobody speaks. There is something self-righteous about Frances’s silence as she goes about her chores. Edith feels that if she speaks she will lose her real, inner life, she must stay remote from Ada and Frances or they will drag her back with them again. To escape the house she checks the mailbox every day. There has been one letter, a note sent from Fremantle, addressed to Ada, thanking her for her hospitality, and, of course, that of her daughters. In Leopold’s hand, but signed by both. Edith doesn’t really expect another letter—nothing was ever promised—but once she sets off up the track to the mailbox, the voices return to her, and she feels jaunty and excited again.

  She will go to them. At night she lies awake and replays the vision over and over, gathering detail. Now in a high fur collar with her hair rolled up she is smoking a cigarette in a station café with misted windows. Now she is wearing a large hat with a veil, like a lady explorer. Camels are passing. Didn’t they speak of taking her to the desert? Something is going to happen, she can tell. Her body is in a strange state of excitement, she’s a little queasy all the time, she’s tired but can’t sleep.

  One night deep down in the drum of her belly she feels a tiny beat, and she knows.

  She has known all along.

  She slumps down into a heavy sleep at last. There are no more voices. The visitors have finally left.

  Edith slept a great deal. Whenever she tried to think about what she should do, she fell asleep. All she did was sleep and stumble off to work at the Sea House. Winter was passing and still the loose black dress fitted her and the big white apron covered her changing body. At home she wore her father’s old stretched pullover. That was all she could think of to do, keep the secret to herself.

  One day Madge grabbed Edith by the arm as she was clearing tables and turned her towards the light of the window.

  ‘Let me have a look at you,’ she said. ‘Heavens, you’re blooming, girl.’

  Edith’s sleepy face flushed with terror.

  ‘Have you an admirer, Edith?’ Madge herself was jaunty and good-humoured these days, as noted by her staff. A retired English major had come to stay. His wife had caught a cold and Madge, exuberantly tweedy, took him for scenic walks with the dog.

  ‘No.’ Edith was too afraid to pull her arm away.

  ‘No, you don’t look happy enough,’ Madge said, losing interest, tapping Edith’s shoulder to dismiss her back to work.

  Reprieve, and yet Edith was queerly disappointed. There were some women in the district, women with red raw hands and six children and half a dozen new-born calves, who would only have had to take one look at her to know. Edith knew this. Call yourself a woman, Madge?

  Did she half want to be found out?

  Perhaps it, the child, had a very obedient nature? It kept itself small and low according to Edith’s will. Or perhaps what she carried was not human, but a tadpole or a swirling ball of worms, conceived when she drank from the creek? Once she dreamt there was no baby, it was all a mistake, it was nothing but wind, because she had gorged herself on raw onions and potatoes in Frances’s vegetable plot. Frances hovered in the dream, glaring, furious at the trick she had played.

  Once when there was an absence of kicks for several days, she thought the baby had died. She thought of the stillborn calf she had seen, bloodied and perfect, delivered with all the drama and bellows of a normal birth. Perhaps she could run away and give birth alone in the bush somewhere, bite the cord with her teeth, bury the tiny body, and it would all be over. If she could will the child not to grow, perhaps she had willed it not to live?

  She was sitting at the table with Ada and Frances when she felt a foot race across her belly, like a sail across the sea. It was hard to believe that no one could see it. She put her hand over it, under the table, as if to say, Ssh. I know you’re back. In spite of herself she was relieved.

  She started walking, to try to clear her mind. She paced, not in her old leaping style, but steadily, down the tracks of her childhood. A hawk spied on her from high above, and she saw herself through its eyes, circled by ocean and forest, a female mammal bearing her young.

  She no longer thought about Aram and Leopold. Who were they? What sort of men were they? It made her too tired, she would have to lie down in the bush and sleep. She understood the boys she had gone to school with better than them, at least she knew how those boys thought. Up the duff. Knocked up. A bun in the oven.

  Once the name Gilgamesh came to her mind as she was walking, and she remembered Leopold’s story of the young king and his friend setting out to conquer the world. She remembered how Leopold and Aram had joked about him, as if he were still alive, as if he were their hero. No doubt Gilgamesh and his friend also left behind a child or two in their travels.

  One of them dies, she remembered. Which one? What happened next?

  One thing she saw very clearly. She had been a fool to think of herself as one of them. She had no part in the adventure. Women had no freedom to go adventuring.

  She started to avoid men. The more solid she became the more she made herself into a shadow. If Reg Tehoe came into the kitchen, or a gardener crossed her path, she disappeared. It was quite easy for men not to notice you. All you had to do was not notice them. The men at her tables, young and old, smelt of tobacco and alcohol and meaty sweat. Their necks and backs and shoulders were hard as walls. They had tremendous appetites. They ate up everything that was put in front of them. When they had finished they threw their napkins down, leaned back, talked more loudly, pleased with themselves.

  For them she could never be more than someone who filled their water jug before they asked for it. A server. She had never understood this before.

  Spring came. Winds blew away the heavy rains and tossed the gleaming trees. Dandelions crept in a bright wave across the clearing, and arum lilies sprang up beside the rushing creek. The evenings were delicate and melancholy. It was a year now since Frank Clark had died.

  One night Ada, straightening her knife and fork on the table like a dinner guest, turned to Edith and discreetly, in formal tones, as if starting a conversation with a neighbour’s daughter, enquired:

  ‘And when is your baby due?’

  ‘In the summer,’ Edith said.

  ‘You must be thankful for that. It’s too cold in winter here for a baby. I was always glad I didn’t have a little
baby here in the winter.’

  Frances kept standing at the stove, her back turned.

  ‘And do you have your things ready?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I will look through what I have,’ said Ada, graciously. But she kept looking into Edith’s eyes as if she were trying to tell her something. ‘And the doctor? What does he say?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him yet.’

  ‘Oh my dear, you must.’ She wagged her finger at Edith. ‘It’s not just for yourself now, you know.’

  Edith flung her head down on the table and cried.

  Frances brought the pot from the stove.

  ‘I’m glad our father isn’t alive,’ she said.

  The lies that Edith had prepared—a secret marriage, a husband who had gone to look for work up north—deserted her when she sat facing Dr Bly across his desk. She’d forgotten about faces like this, faces of men like Dr Bly or her father, so careworn and dignified and grim. No chance of hiding from those sad, shrewd eyes. The world worked because of men like this. Yet she felt for him as she had for her father, a queer sort of pity.

  He seemed to know at once she was unmarried.

  ‘Tell me, Miss Clark,’ he said, as he washed his hands, ‘are you a lonely girl? In my experience it is usually the lonely girls who get themselves into this sort of pickle, eh?’

  Edith couldn’t say if she was lonely or not. She could not answer him, though she knew she should, when he was trying to be kind.

  ‘There’s always the Home of the Good Shepherd in Perth, you know. An adoption could be arranged.’