She laughs, then looks about to see if anyone has heard, then laughs again. Eleven she was, and Dezzy must have been twelve. Blond and buck-toothed, the baker's boy.
All that seems closer now than this Rock ever was. Closer than last week.
Plus a butcher-bird her uncle Clary owned that was called Tom Leach after a mate he'd lost in France. Which was where — a good deal later of course — she lost Leonard. It could whistle like a champ. And a little stage set, no bigger than a cigar box, that belonged to Beverley.
Buss's mother, that consisted of a single room with walls that were all mirrors, and little gold tables and chairs, and a boy in silk breeches presenting to a girl in a hooped skirt a perfect silver rose. It played a tune, but the mechanism was broken so she never got to hear it. She had pushed her face so close once, to the tiny open door, that her hot breath fogged up all the mirrors, and Beverley Buss had said, "Look, Dulce, you've made a different weather.”
Cancer. Beverley Buss, she'd heard, had died of cancer. Beverley McGowan by then.
She had loved that little theatre, and would, if she could, have willed herself small enough to squeeze right in through the narrow doorway and join that boy and girl in their charmed life that was so different from her own barefooted one — she bet that girl didn't have warts on her thumb or get ringworm or nits — but had managed it only once, in a dream, and was so shocked to be confronted with herself over and over again in the seven mirrors, which were only too clear on that occasion, that she burst into tears and had to pinch herself awake not to die of shame in front of such a perfect pair.
So what did this Rock have to do with any of that?
Nothing. How could it? It wasn't on the map. It wasn't even on the list—there was a list, and you had to find out where the names belonged and mark them in. Capes, bays, the river systems, even the ones that ran only for a month or two each year. You marked them in with a dotted line. But this Rock that everyone makes such a fuss of now wasn't on the list, let alone the map. So there!
It certainly wasn't on her map. Her map, in those days, was five or six cross-streets between their weatherboard, her school, the open-air pictures where coloured people sat on the other side of a latticed partition, and the Townsville Baths. Later, in Brisbane after the war, it was the streets around West End as she dragged Douglas and pushed Donald, up to the shops and then back again in the boiling sun, her route determined by the places where you could get a stroller over the kerb.
Big grasshoppers would be chugging past, and at nesting time you had to watch out for magpies. Nothing to see on the way. A stray dog sniffing then lifting its leg in the weeds round a lamp-post. Roadmen at work round a fenced-off hole. A steamroller laying a carpet of hot tar, and that smell, burning pitch or hellfire, and the fellers in army boots and shorts at work beside it, most of them leaning on shovels or sitting on one heel with a fag hanging from their lip, waiting for the billy to boil over a pile of sticks. The tar smell thinning at last to the peppery scent that came through a paling fence. Dry stalks in a spare allotment.
Sometimes she stopped off to have morning tea with her only friend at that time, a Chinese lady called Mrs. Wau Hing.
Mrs. Wau Hing had a cabinet in her front room made of carved cherrywood, with shelves and brackets and appliqud ivory flowers, chrysanthemums and little fine-winged hummingbirds. It was beautiful. Though you wouldn't really know what to do with it. Mrs. Wau Hing called it decorative.
Mrs. Wau Hing called her Blossom (which was silly really, but she liked it) and gave her chicken in garlicky black sauce to take home, which Leonard said “different.” Too different for her, but never mind, it was the thought.
What pleased her was the fine blue-whiteness of the bowl her friend sent it home in, with its design of pinpricks filled with transparent glaze.
When she went out barefoot in her nightie to get a glass of water at the kitchen sink, there it was, rinsed and shining in the wooden rack along with her own familiar crockery.
So what did the Rock have to do with any of that? Or with the stones she had in her kidneys in 1973?
These days, mind you, it's everywhere. Including on TV. Turns up dripping with tomato sauce as a hamburger, or as a long red-clay mould that starts to heave, then cracks open, and when all the bits fall away there's a flash-looking car inside, a Ford Fairlane — stuff like that. Its red shadow turned into a dingo one night and took that baby.
Suddenly it has plonked itself down in the middle of people's lives like something that has just landed from outer space, or pushed up out of the centre of the earth, and occupies the gap that was filled once by — by what? She can't think. Movie stars? Jesus? The Royal Family? It has opened people's minds — this is Donald again — in the direction of the incommensurable. What a mouthful! It is exerting an influence. Well, not on her it isn't! She gives it a quick dismissive glance and takes another deep drag on her Winfield.
Cathedrals. With Leonard it was cathedrals. As soon as the war was over and the big liners were on the go again he started planning their trip. They made it at last in 1976.
Cathedrals. Great sooty piles at the end of crooked little streets, more often than not with something missing, like the veterans they made a space for, mutils, on every bus.
Or on islands. Or high up on cliffs. Leonard's eyes went all watery just at the sight of one of them and she felt him move quietly away.
He wasn't religious in a praying way. When Leonard got down on his knees each morning it was to polish his boots — Nugget boot polish was what he believed in. The smell of it hung about in the hallway long after he had taken his briefcase and hat and run off to the tram. But with cathedrals, she'd decided, it was the gloom that got him. Which had been brewing there for centuries, and connected with some part of his nature she recognised, and felt soft towards, but had never felt free to enter. She associated it with the bald patch on top of his head, which you saw, or she did, only when he got down on his knees in the hallway on a sheet of newspaper, and held one boot, then the other, very lovingly to his heart, and stroked it till it shone.
She felt such a surge of tenderness for him then. For his reliability, his decency. And for that bald spot, which was the one thing she could see in him that he couldn't, a hidden weakness. That's the sort of thing that got her. But cathedrals, no thanks!
When she did manage to feel something, other than a chill in her bones that was like creeping death, was if the organ happened to be playing, or the sun, which was rare enough, was dropping colours from a stained-glass window on to the stony floor, in a play of pink and gold.
As for the proportions, as Leonard called them, well, she didn't go in for height, she decided; all that gave you was a crick in the neck. What she liked was distance. A good long view towards the sunset, or at a certain soft hour at home, towards an empty intersection, and if you got a glimpse of something more it would be the way the hills blurred off into blueness beyond the last of the flashing roofs. You would feel small then, in a way she found comforting.
What really put her off was when Leonard, half lying in one of the pews, with the guide laid open in his lap and his arms extended along the wooden back, rolled his eyes up, like suffering Jesus or one of their Catholic saints. Where, she wondered, had he got that from? As far as she knew he was a Methodist.
As they moved on from Cologne to those others — the French ones — she'd taken against the cathedrals, started to really resent them.