He drifted out to the kitchen, where people were seated around a scrubbed-pine table stacked with empties and strewn with scraps. Others leaned against the fridge and the old-fashioned porcelain sink. He leaned too.
No one paid any attention to him, though they weren't hostile. They just went on arguing.
Politics. Though it wasn't really an argument either, since they all agreed.
He stepped past them to a little back porch with three steps down to a sloping yard, grassy, the edges of it, near the fence, thick with sword fern in healthy clumps. It was getting dark.
There was a big camphor laurel tree, huge really, and a Hill's Hoist turning slowly in the breeze that he felt, just faintly, on his brow, and clothes pegged out to dry that no one had bothered to bring in. They were hung out just anyhow. Not the way a woman would do it.
He watched them for a while: the shirts white in the growing darkness, filling with air a moment, then collapsing; the tree, also stirring, filling with air and all its crowded gathering of leaves responding, shivering. He too felt something. Something familiar and near.
He thought of Helen. Of the girls. He did not want the feeling of sadness that came to him, which had been there all day, he felt, under the throb of expectation, and which declared itself now in the way these clothes had been hung out, the tea towels all crooked, the shirts pegged awkwardly at the shoulder so that the sleeves hung empty and slack.
Back in the hallway he got talking to a very young woman in a miniskirt, hot pink, with a tight-fitting hot-pink top and a glossy bag over her shoulder, and glossy cork-heeled sandals, her toenails painted the same hot pink as her lips and clothes. He hadn't seen her at the funeral. She had just arrived. He introduced himself. “I'm Debbie's brother-in-law,” he told her, but without making it sound, he hoped, like a claim.
The girl took a sip from her glass and looked up at him, all eyelashes. “Who's Debbie?” she asked, genuinely stumped.
He opened his mouth but felt it would be foolish to explain. Still, he was shocked.
A little later he found himself engaged with another woman, older and very drunk, who in just minutes began pushing herself against him. He was a bit drunk himself at this stage. Not very drunk, but enough to go where his senses took him. He stood with his back against a wall of the crowded hallway and the woman pushed her knee between his thighs in the thick woollen suit and her tongue into his mouth. Her fingers were in his hair. He was sweating.
She undid a button on his shirt, put her nose in. “Ummm,” she murmured, ”au naturel, I like it. Where have they been keeping you?” When they broke briefly to catch their breath he glanced around in case Harry was close by.
All this now was what he had expected or hoped for, but he was surprised how little of the initiative was his. Somewhere in the back of his head, as the woman urged her tongue into it and her hand went exploring below, he was repeating to “I'm Debbie's brother-in-law. She's dead, this is her wake.” Since he had arrived in this house he was the only one, so far as he knew, who'd volunteered her name.
Things were going fast down in his pants, the woman luxuriously leading. He liked it that for once someone else was making the moves. A small noise struggled in his throat. No one around seemed to care, or even to have noticed. He wondered how far all this was to go, and saw that he could simply go with it. He was pleased, in a quiet, self-congratulatory way, that this was how he was taking it.
The woman drew her head back, looked at him quizzically, and smiled. “Umm,” she said, "nice. I'll be back.” Then, fixing her hair with a deft hand, she disengaged; gently, as he thought of it, set him down. He was left red-faced and bothered, fiercely sweating.
He dealt with his own hair, a few flat-handed slaps, discreetly adjusted things below. He felt like a kid. What was he supposed to do now? Wait for her to come back? Follow? He leaned against the wall and stared at the plaster ceiling. His head was reeling. He decided to stumble after her, but she was gone in the crowd and instead he found Harry, squatting on a low three-legged stool that was too small for him, his thumb in a book.
“Harry?”
Harry glanced up over the big horn-rimmed glasses he used for reading. He looked like a professor, Andy thought with amusement, but could not fathom his expression. Harry handed him the book.
It was a poetry book. There were more, exactly like the one he was holding, on the shelf at Harry's elbow, with the gap between them where he had pulled this one out. Andy shifted his shoulders, rubbed the end of his nose, consulted Harry. Who nodded.
Andy rubbed his nose again and opened the book, turning one page, then the next. To Debbie, he read on a page all to itself. All through, he could see, her name was scattered. Debbie. Sometimes Deb.
He was puzzled. Impressed. The book looked substantial but he had no way of judging how important or serious such a thing might be, or whether Harry, in showing it to him, had meant him to see in it a justification or an affront. It was about things that were private, that's what he saw. But here they were in a book that just anyone could pick up.
He turned more pages, mostly so as not to face Harry. Odd words jumped out at him. “Witchery" was one — he hoped Harry hadn't seen that one. In another place, "cunt.” Right there on the page. So unexpected it made his stomach jump. In a book of poetry! He didn't understand that. Or any of this. He snapped the book shut, and moved to restore it to the shelf, but Harry reached out and took it from him.
Andy frowned, uncertain where Harry's mind was moving.
Using both hands, Harry eased himself upright, slipped his glasses into one pocket of his jacket, forced the book into another, and turned down the hallway towards the front door.
Andy followed.
So it was over, they were leaving. It struck Andy that he had never discovered whose house this was.
“You need to say goodbye to anyone?” he asked Harry.
“Never bloody met anyone,” Harry told him.
Outside it was night-time, blue and cool. Some people on the steps got up to let them through. One of them said, "Oh, you're leaving,” and another, "Goodbye" — strangers, incurious about who they might be but with that much in them of politeness or affability.
They found the car, and Andy took his jacket off and tossed it into the back seat. Harry retained his.
They drove across bridges, through night traffic now. Past water riddled with red and green neon, and high tower blocks where all the fluorescent panels in the ceilings of empty offices were brightly pulsing.
After a bit, Harry asked out of nowhere, "What's a muse? Do you know what it means? A muse?”
“Amuse?” Andy asked in turn. “Like when you're amused?” He didn't get it.
“No. A — muse. M-U-S-E.”
Andy shook his head.
“Don't worry,” Harry told him. “I'll ask Macca. He'll know.”
Andy felt slighted, but Harry was right, Macca would know. Macca was a workmate of theirs, a reader. If anyone knew, Macca would. But the book in Harry's pocket was a worry to Andy. He hoped Macca wouldn't uncover too much of what was in it. He'd seen enough, himself, to be disturbed by how much that was personal, and which you might want to keep that way, was set down bold as brass for any Tom, Dick, or Harry — ah, Harry — to butt in on. He didn't understand that, and doubted Harry would either.
Suddenly Harry spoke again.
“She was such a bright little thing,” he said. “You wouldn't credit.”
Andy swallowed. This was it. A single bald statement breaking surface out of the stream of thought Harry was adrift in — which was all, Andy thought, he might ever hear. He kept his eyes dead ahead.