City boy.
He rode up the next day, salt leaving the air as he climbed into the hills. Once he left the paved road he saw nobody. The track bucked and coiled through a landscape of smooth white boulders, grey pines, and cactus that twisted in the dust like a nest of snakes. After five miles — curiously enough she was accurate where he least expected her to be — he saw the house, crouching at the end of a ridge, just at the point where the track dipped down and hid. All loose tiles and cracked windows and walls patched up with sheets of tin, it used the colours of the land it stood in, grey and brown and yellow, so it had the look of a creature that should’ve been extinct, a creature that had only survived because it had a good disguise. It used to be a farm, he remembered her saying, and it still breathed like one. When he pulled into the yard, chickens ran off in straight lines through the dirt and dogs began to bounce around his tyres like ping-pong balls and people came round corners and leaned on things.
The place was cut off, true enough, but all that stuff about it being lonely as a grave, that was just her talking. She did a lot of that. She’d talk and talk, and make things bigger than they really were. Or sometimes she’d make them smaller. There was nothing lonely about it, unless you call living with six people lonely. There was Joan, a woman who was recovering from some kind of breakdown. There was an old man by the name of Fisher. There was a young married couple, Pete and Chrissie, and their baby. And there was Twilight, the old black man from the bar. That was six, not counting India-May herself and the family of gypsies who camped among the shredded tyres and blackened car-parts out the back. She surrounded herself with people, all different kinds, sometimes she was lucky, sometimes she wasn’t, but it didn’t matter to her. In her book the worst people were preferable to no people at all. She was someone who heard each grain in the hour-glass, she felt the passing seconds like sandpaper against her softest skin. Time actually seemed to hurt her, and people helped her get through it. She’d been ripped off more times than she could remember. Jewellery, money, clothes. Even a car once. She was philosophical about it. She believed it evened out, either in this life or the next time round. She was always showing Nathan things that she’d been given. It always seemed to him, as he was asked to examine some painting or basket or packet of seeds, for Christ’s sake, that she’d been had, that she’d come off worse. But she’d be smiling, and she’d be tossing her hair over her shoulder like salt, and she’d be saying in that breathless voice of hers, ‘See, I told you. Isn’t it beautiful?’ Sometimes it seemed to Nathan that her life was just that, a feat of held breath, just another ten seconds, just another five, and then death would flood her lungs like water, a string of glass bubbles to the surface and then nothing. She was scared in a way that he could understand. The kind of fear that sends you running across a six-lane highway or jumping into rapids. She was someone who ran towards her fear, screaming. Who tried to frighten it. Who, in another period of history, would’ve been worshipped as a saint or burned as a witch.
She gave him a room on the third floor. Walls the colour of eggshell, a row of glass bottles on the mantelpiece, and a bed with springs, as promised. It was a spiritual room, she told him, it had been waiting for him, and standing at the window that evening he could almost believe it. He could see right down the valley. Tomorrow Bay glowed beyond the hills, an orange dome in the dark-blue sky, as if a spaceship had just landed. But the town seemed alien to him now, he felt no pull at all. He would be happy where he was. In the morning he sat down at the kitchen table and she explained how the house worked. All her ‘guests’ paid rent, some in money, some in kind. The old man mended shoes. The woman with the breakdown cooked the meals. And Twilight, well, she’d leave that to his imagination. ‘You choose how you want to pay,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter to me.’
He chose to pay in money. That year he was working at Seaview Lodge, a mock-Tudor hotel just off the highway as you headed north out of Tomorrow Bay. The people who stayed there were mostly in their sixties, and they preferred the sun-lounge and the tea-room to the beach. Only the fanatics swam, plunging their bald heads and tumbling flesh into the water at dawn. He arranged the deck chairs and parasols in the morning and folded them away at night. He collected litter on a pointed stick. He raked the sand. There was very little actual lifesaving to be done. He saved an heiress once, and almost wished he hadn’t. A miracle how her cramp disappeared the moment he took her in his arms. ‘He’s a hero,’ she announced to the small crowd that had gathered on the beach, ‘a gen-u-ine hero,’ and insisted on inviting him to dinner that night. Over dessert and coffee she told him about the pool she had at home. ‘It’s inlaid with gold mosaic. You never swam in anything so heavenly.’ And then she offered him a position as her own private lifeguard. Position. She actually used that word. ‘Money’s no object,’ she said. But he turned the offer down, making his excuses with a grace and tact that only served to enhance her admiration.
‘Do you know what she said?’ he told the waitresses later. ‘She said, “Money’s no object,” and do you know what I said?’
They couldn’t guess.
‘I said, “Nor am I.”’
‘You didn’t,’ they said.
He grinned. ‘I wanted to.’
For weeks afterwards the waitresses were always sidling up to him and whispering, ‘Money’s no object.’ The chambermaids teased him too. He was, in any case, a mystery to them. He was open and friendly, but he never focused his attentions on any one of them in particular (unlike his predecessor, who had focused his attentions on five of them, one after the other). They decided he must have some violent, jealous woman in the mountains, and he let them believe it.
The ride home took about forty minutes. He headed west on a slim dark road that arrowed across the coastal plain and up into the hills, where it began to come adrift. No cars suddenly. No light. Only thoughts for company, thoughts that jumped like colts from one piece of ground to quite another piece of ground altogether. The whistle of air in his helmet, the smell of the hot dust cooling. If he reached the top before sunset he would stop and watch the last light leave the ocean, the clouds above sweetening in colour, as if they were slowly being dipped in syrup. Real dreamy, just like India-May had said. The landscape was spoiled only by a pyramid of trash that rose into the sky some distance to the north. This was the municipal dump. Though it was situated five miles out of town, its sweet odour would carry along the beaches when the wind blew in the wrong direction, and had even been known, on occasion, to invade the corridors of Seaview Lodge. By the time he reached the farm, the dogs would be chained up for the night. They knew his bike and didn’t bark. He’d switch his engine off and listen to the black air buzz.
Once inside he’d climb the stairs to his room and close the door and gaze through the window at the sky. Still as deep water. Only the ripple of a car in the valley, a distant aeroplane. He’d lie on his bed under the roof and turn the leather bracelet on his wrist. He’d been given it by an old woman who played the flute. She sat under a palm tree just beyond the hotel fence. Her skin was olive, the colour of slow rivers, her limbs as thin as wire. She always wore the same red plastic raincoat. Every time it rained, which was most afternoons for about fifteen minutes, she played the flute. She always played the same piece. She seemed to have chosen it specially because it lasted the same length of time as the average shower. Sometimes she finished before the rain did, sometimes afterwards, and he’d never forget one afternoon when her last note coincided with the last drop of rain and he heard her laugh in astonishment. She had sounded, in that moment, like a young girl. He had to speak to her. Though all he could say, when he was standing in front of her, was, ‘I’m glad you’re here.’ She reached into her pocket and handed him the leather bracelet, and he put it on right away. He’d worn it ever since. Sometimes it would seem as if the music rose out of the bracelet and, hands linked behind his head, he’d topple slowly into sleep, only to wake later, his arms numb, the moon caught in the window, and all his clothes still on. And voices drifted up from below, no words, just resonances, it was like the murmur of a plucked string, it was the same hum, like being inside an instrument. And sometimes he’d go downstairs and open the kitchen door, his eyes blinking against the sudden light, and he’d join the others in a cup of India-May’s herb tea.