North of Nowhere, South of Loss. Janette Turner Hospital
got something arranged at uni,” he said smoothly, unctuously. “I didn’t know about it, and the thing is, I can’t get out of it. I’ll tell you what though. Philippa and I will take you out to lunch tomorrow. She’ll pick you up at twelve o’clock, okay? and we’ll all have lunch at the Hilton. Look, I’ve got to rush, I’m terribly sorry. Look after yourself, Dorrie. See you tomorrow, all right? Bye now.”
“I’m going,” I said as he lurched back. “I’m taking a cab right now to your mother’s. I won’t be part of this.”
“Philippa, stay with me.”
“I won’t. It’s just plain goddamn rude and boorish when she’s got a meal prepared. At least one of us … I’m just bloody not going to—What? What is it? What the hell is it?
He looked so stricken that there was nothing to be said.
“All right,” I conceded, resigned. “Where do you want to go?”
“Come back to the Hilton with me. I don’t want to be alone. I have to get blind stinking drunk.”
In the cab I said: “How come I feel more wracked with guilt than you do?”
He laughed. “You actually think I’m not wracked with guilt?”
“Oh, I know why I am,” I said. “It’s because I’m a mother too.” If my son did this to me, I thought, I’d bleed grief. My whole life would turn into a bruise.
“There’s a lot you don’t know,” Brian said. “I can’t talk about it unless I’m blind stinking drunk.”
We didn’t go to his room. It wasn’t like that. We have never been lovers, never will be, never could be, and not because it isn’t there, that volatile aura, the fizz and spit of sexual possibility. I vaguely remember that as we got drunker we held each other. I seem to remember us both sobbing at some stage of the night. It wasn’t brother/sister either, not an incest taboo. No. We were once part of a multiform being, a many-celled organism that played in the childhood sea, that swam in the ocean of Brisbane, an alpha-helical membrane-embedded coiled-coil of an us-thing. We were not Other to each other or them, we were already Significantly Us, and we wept for our missing parts. We drank to our damaged, our lost, our dead.
When drink got us down to the ocean floor, I think Brian said: “It’s the house. I really believe that if I went there, I wouldn’t be able to breathe. I’d never get out of it alive.”
And I think I asked: “What did your mother mean about the nights? Those awful nights, she said.”
And the second I said it, a memory I didn’t remember I had shifted itself and began to rise like a great slow black-finned sea-slug, an extinct creature, far earlier than icthyosaurus, earlier than the earliest ancestor of the manta ray. It flapped the gigantic black sails of its fins and shock waves hit the cage of my skull and I was swimming back to Brian’s front gate, I was waiting for him there, fragrant currents of frangipani were swirling round, and these monstrously eerie sounds, this guttural screaming and sobbing, came pouring out through the verandah louvres in a black rush that whirlpooled around me, that sucked, that pulled … I clung to the gate, giddy with terror.
Then Brian came out of the house with his schoolbag slung over his shoulder and he pushed the gate open and pushed his way through and walked so fast that I had to run to catch up. “What is it?” I asked, my heart yammering at the back of my teeth.
“What’s what?” Brian demanded.
“That noise.” I stopped, but Brian kept walking. “That noise!” I yelled, and Brian stopped and turned round and I pointed, because you could almost see those awful sounds curdling around us. Brian walked back and stood in front of me and looked me levelly in the eyes and cocked his head to one side. He gave the impression of listening attentively, of politely straining his ears, but of hearing nothing.
“What noise?” he asked.
He was so convincing that the sound sank beneath the floor of my memory for forty years, even though, two blocks later, he said dismissively, “It’s nothing. It’s Ed. He does it all the time. It’s from the war.”
And forty years later, swimming up through a reef of stubbies and empty Scotch bottles, he said: “He never left New Guinea really. He never got away. And it was catching. After a while, Dorrie used to have Ed’s nightmares, I think.”
“Oh Brian.”
“Sometimes the neighbours would call the police. The only place they felt safe was the house. They never went anywhere.”
“I never had any inkling.”
“Because I protected them. I was magic. I designed a sort of ozone layer of insulation in my mind, you couldn’t see through it, or hear, and I used to wrap them up in it, the house, and my dad, and my mum.”
My dad and my mum. It would be something I could give her the next day, something to put with the corsage.
It was a long time after I rang the doorbell before anyone came. And when she came, she didn’t open the door. She just stood there on the verandah peering out between the old wooden louvres. She looked like a rabbit stunned by headlights.
“It’s me, Mrs Leckie. Philippa.”
“Philippa?” she said vaguely, searching back through her memory for a clue. She opened the door and looked out uncertainly, like a sleepwalker. She was still in her housecoat and slippers. She squinted and studied me. “Philippa!” she said. “Good gracious. Are these for me? Oh, they’re lovely. Lovely. Just a tic, and I’ll put them in water. Come on in, Philippa, and make yourself at home.”
It was eerie all right, one little step across a threshold, one giant freefall to the past. There was the old HMV radio, big as a small refrigerator, with its blistered wood front. There were two framed photographs on it, items from the nearer past, tiny deviations on the room as I knew it. One was of Brian’s wedding, the other of his brother’s. I picked up the frame of Brian’s and studied it. I hadn’t been at his wedding. We’d all got married in the cell-dividing years of the us-thing. I’d been overseas, though my mother had sent a newspaper clipping. I was trying to tell from the photograph if Brian had been happy. Was he thinking: Now I’ve escaped?
“I don’t understand about marriages these days,” she said, coming up behind me with the vase. She set the flowers on top of the radio. “I always thought Brian would marry you, Philippa.”
“That would have been some scrap,” I said. “We were always arguing, remember?”
“You would argue till the cows came home,” she smiled. “I always thought you’d get married.”
I set the frame down again, and she picked it up. “They didn’t have any children,” she said sadly. “Barry either. I don’t have any grandchildren at all.” She returned Brian and his bride to the top of the radio. “I wish they’d known him before the war, that’s all. Before it happened. I just wish … But if wishes could be roses, Ed used to say, or maybe it was the other way round. Would you like to see them, Philippa?”
I scrambled along the trail of her thought. “Oh,” I said. “Yes, I would. I noticed them from the gate. And your frangipani’s enormous, it’s going to swallow up the house.”
“Ed planted that,” she said. “He was always good with his hands, he had a green thumb. I have to get the boy down the road to mow the lawn for me now. Watch out for that bit of mud, Philippa, there were some cats got in. These ones,” she said, “Ed planted when the boys were born, one for each. This one was for Brian.”
It was a tea rose, a rich ivory. Champagne-coloured, perhaps. Off white, I would probably say to him in some future joust. His mother hovered over it like a quick bird, darting, plucking off dead petals, curled leaves, a tiny beetle, a grasshopper, an ant.
“You’ve