What Harry was thinking of, he knew, was how far that bright little thing he had been so fond of, all that time ago, had moved away from him, how far he had lost track of her.
He had his own bright little girl, Janine. She was ten. He felt sweetly bound to her — painfully bound, he felt now, in the prospect of inevitable loss. She too would go off, go elsewhere.
At the time Harry was recalling, Andy thought, he would have been a young man, the same age I am now. He had never thought of Harry as young. There was a lot he had not thought of.
He glanced at Harry. Nothing more would be said. Those last few words had risen up out of a swell of feeling, unbearable perhaps, that Harry was still caught up in, but when Andy looked again — the look could only be brief — he got no clue.
A wave of sadness struck him. Not only for Harry's isolation but for his own. He was fond of Harry, but they might as well have been on different planets.
“Have a bit of a nap if you like,” he told Harry gently. “You must be buggered. I'll be right.” What he meant, though Harry would not take it that way, was that he wanted to be alone.
In just minutes Harry had sunk down in the seat, letting the seat belt take his weight, and had followed his thoughts deeper, then deeper again, into sleep. Andy focused on the road ahead, his hands resting lightly on the wheel. Free now to follow his own thoughts. Not thinking exactly. Letting the thoughts rise up and flow into him. Flow through him.
Something had come to him back there and changed things. When? he wondered. In the noisy hallway? Where in a world that was so far outside his experience, and among people whose lives were so different from his own, he'd given himself over to what might come? No, he'd been fooling himself, and he blushed now, though no one but himself would ever know about it. Earlier than that.
His body, which knew better than his slow mind, set him back in the bluish dusk of that back porch.
For a moment there he had been out of things, looking down from high up into a quiet backyard. A camphor laurel tree, its swarming leaves lifted by a quickening of the air. The same breeze touching shirts pegged awkwardly on a line, filling them with breath. Then like fingers in his hair. It was something in those particular objects that had struck him. Something he felt, almost grasped, that was near and familiar.
Or it was a way of looking at things that was in himself. That was himself. A lonely thought, this — the beginning, perhaps, of another kind of loss, though his own healthy resilience told him it need not be.
He drove. The road was straight now, a double highway running fast through blue night scrub. Under banks of smoky cloud a rounded moon bounced along treetops. He put on speed and felt released. Not from his body — he was more aware than ever of that, of its blockiness and persistence — but from the earth's pull upon it. As if, seated here in this metal capsule, knees flexed, spine propped against tilted leather, it was the far high universe they were sailing through, and those lights off to the side of the ribboning highway — small townships settled down to the night's TV, roadside service stations all lit up in the dark, with their aisles of chocolate biscuits and potato crisps — were far-flung constellations, and Harry, afloat now in the vast realm of sleep, and he, in a lapse of consciousness of a different kind, had taken off, and weightless as in space or in flying dreams, were flying.
Mrs. Porter and the Rock
The rock is Ayers Rock, Uluru. Mrs. Porter's son, Donald, has brought her out to look at it. They are at breakfast, on the second day of a three-day tour, in the Desert Rose Room of the Yullara Sheraton. Mrs. Porter, sucking voluptuously, is on her third cigarette, while Donald, a born letter writer who will happily spend half an hour shaping and reshaping a description in his head, or putting a dazzling sheen on an ironical observation, is engaged on one of the airy rockets, all fizz and sparkle and recondite allusions, that he can barely wait, once he is out of town, to launch in the direction of his more discerning friends. In a large, loose, schoolboyish hand, on the Sheraton's rich notepaper, he writes:
To complete the scene, only the sacred river is missing, for this resort is surely inspired by the great tent city of Kubla Khan. Nestling among spinifex dunes, it rises, like a late vision of the impossible East, out of the rust-red sands, a postmodern Bedouin encampment, all pink and apricot turrets and slender aluminium poles that hum and twang as they prick the skyline. Over the walkways and public spaces hover huge, shadow-making sails that are meant to evoke, in those of us for whom deserts create a sense of spiritual unease, the ocean we left two thousand miles back.
So there you have it. The pitched tents of the modern nomads That tribe of the internationally restless who have come on here from the Holy Land, or from Taos or Porto Cervo or Nepal, to stare for a bit on an imaginable wonder — when, that is, they can lift their eyes from the spa pool, or in pauses between the Tasmanian Salmon and the Crme Brle …
Mrs. Porter is here on sufferance, accepting, with minimal grace, what Donald had intended as a treat. Frankly she'd rather be at Jupiter's playing the pokies. She takes a good drag on her cigarette, looks up from the plate — as yet untouched — of scrambled egg, baked beans, and golden croquettes, and is astonished to find herself confronting, high up on the translucent canopy of the dining-room ceiling, a pair of colossal feet. The fat soles are sloshing about up there in ripples of light. Unnaturally magnified, and with the glare beyond them, diffuse, almost blinding, of the Central Australian sun. She gives a small cry and ducks. And Donald, who keeps a keen eye on her and is responsive to all her jerks and twitches, observing the movement but not for the moment its cause, demands, "What? What's the matter? What is it?”
Mrs. Porter shakes her head. He frowns, subjects her to worried scrutiny — one of his what's-she-up-to-now looks. She keeps her head down. After a moment, with another wary glance in her direction, he goes back to his letter.
Mrs. Porter throws a swift glance upwards.
Mmm, the feet are still there. Beyond them, distorted by fans of watery light, is the outline of a body, almost transparent — shoulders, a gigantic trunk. Black. This one is black. An enormous black man is up there wielding a length of hose, and the water is red. The big feet are bleeding. Well, that's a new one.
Mrs. Porter nibbles at her toast. She needs to think about this. Between bites she takes long, sweet drags on her cigarette. If she ignores this latest apparition, she thinks, maybe it will go away.
Lately — well, for quite a while now — she's been getting these visitations — apparitions is how she thinks of them, though they appear at such odd times, and in such unexpected guises, that she wonders if they aren't in fact re visitations that she herself has called up out of bits and pieces of her past, her now scattered and inconsiderate memory.
In the beginning she thought they might be messengers — well, to put it more plainly, angels. But their only message seemed to be one she already knew: that the world she found herself in these days was a stranger place than she'd bargained for, and getting stranger.
She had wondered as well — but this was only at the start — if they might be tormentors, visitors from places she'd never been, like Antarctica, bringing with them a breath of icebergs. But that, she'd decided pretty smartly, was foolish. Dulcie, she told herself, you're being a fool! She wasn't the sort of person that anyone out there would want to torment. All her apparitions did was make themselves visible, hang around for a bit, disturbing the afternoon or whatever with a sudden chill, and drift off.