There were days when being eighty-two was a terrible thing; bad days, when Iris was subject to small jagged outbursts, the remains of her temper, which had worn down like everything else. On bad days, Iris was afraid: not of what was waiting but of what was past, the arrangements that had seemed as fixed as stars and now shuddered with plastic invitation. On bad days she allowed herself to dream. She dreamed of a childhood unclouded by fear, where a raised voice signalled delight, not anger. She dreamed of a girl who dropped to her knees before a Chinaman kneeling in betel-stained dirt.
It was dangerous reverie. Iris could feel its pull. She rationed it, as she rationed the little liqueur-filled chocolate bottles Tommy brought her, measuring out doses of Cointreau and daring. She sculpted the past according to whim, as a child plays with the future; each having an abundance of material.
Iris had arrived in the world when Sebastian de Souza was twenty-seven years old. Twenty-three years earlier, he had asked for a dolls’ tea-set for his birthday. It was yet another improbability: no matter how hard she tried, Iris was unable to construct a story that coupled dainty pink china and the man whose rage had filled her childhood; the bony orb of even his smallest knuckle refused the curve of the teacup’s handle. Nevertheless, these things were true: her father had once been four years old and wanted a miniature tea-set more than anything in the world.
How could you know when something was the last time, wondered Iris. The last time a stranger turned to look at you in the street, the last time you could stand up while putting on your knickers, the last time there was no pain when you tried to turn over in bed, the last time you imagined your life would change for the better. On TV a woman sang about fabric softener, and Iris longed to hold her father’s cup; to gaze, one last time, on fearless red dragons. Her heart stuttered with the marvellous absurdity of it: that blossom-thin porcelain should survive when so much had been smashed or lost or discarded.
Beside that miracle, it was scarcely remarkable that Iris Loxley, née de Souza, who had sausage curls and climbed a banyan in the monsoon, Iris, who had an eighteen-inch waist and rode a pony by a mountain stream, that gardenia-scented Iris, bare-shouldered and straight-spined in the gilt-lace frame beside the telephone, should have mutated into this mound of ruined flesh, which had flouted gravity for eighty-two years and was afraid of falling.
Nelly had her head back, drinking water. When she passed him the bottle Tom said, ‘Have you noticed? We’ve both stopped calling.’
‘It’s the sun, on top of not enough sleep. Making us dopey.’ ‘Or because we know he can’t still be alive.’ Tom said,‘Look,
I can drive you back this evening. Or drop you at a station. No point us both wasting our time.’
‘So let’s say he’s dead. Don’t you want to keep looking anyway? We can still take him home.’
‘Hey, look.’
They bent over the wing: bone and cartilage and dusty brown feathers. Tom’s toes drew back in his boots.
‘Do you think…?’
He sniffed: nothing. ‘Probably been there for days.’
In the clearing nothing seemed to have changed. The smooth tyre, an assortment of damp rubbish. Tom had half expected the remains of brutality: smashed bones, slit corpses strung from trees. His foot stirred a set of fi lthy cardboard corrugations stamped with a brewer’s logo and uncovered a condom.
‘Did you hear the motorbike? Last night, when you were out?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘I came looking for you. Couldn’t see you.’
Nelly yawned. Then said, indifferently, ‘I walked up to the top of the hill.’
Tom fastened a length of yellow tape to a branch. Nelly was somewhere on the hillside below. He stepped forward, trying to do so soundlessly. For a while now it had been gaining force, the impression that something was listening to him.
A stick cracked in the distance. Tom peered through the undergrowth and caught a glimpse of red between jittery leaves. He was about to call out to Nelly, when he remembered his dream of the previous week, the stumpy child raging over the roof, its face full of fury. Suddenly he was very frightened. Trees he couldn’t name pressed about him.
Fear revived the memory of an exchange that had taken place months earlier, not long after Tom had begun visiting the Preserve. A tiny fat woman he knew by sight, a friend of Yelena’s, had been complaining about another student. ‘It creeps me out, how she never says much. But just hangs about watching everything-you know?’
Yelena said amiably, ‘You are right, it is very powerful this way to be still and observe.’ Her gaze drifted about the little group drinking shiraz from a cardboard box. ‘It is frightening. Like Tom.’
People concentrated on the contents of their glasses. The fat girl’s eyes met Tom’s briefl y. A terrified giggle broke from her, and she spoke at once of something else. The conversation slid gratefully away.
Pinned in Nelly’s armchair, Tom was returned to a rainy morning when, in the course of a schoolboy discussion about breakfast, a classmate of his, a boy named Sanjeev Swarup, had said, ‘Boiled eggs make your breath stink. Like Loxley’s.’
There was the shock, never adequately anticipated, of finding himself, the sovereign subject, an object of conversation. There was the terrible content of the statement, of course. But what had pierced Tom was the casualness of Swarup’s remark; a fatal lightness echoed in Yelena’s words. Like Sanjeev Swarup, she had intended neither harm nor provocation, had referred merely to a known, accepted fact. Tom thought, So that is how they see me! It was as if he had glanced down and discovered a precipice at his feet.
It was an incident he had dismissed over time, reasoning that as Yelena and the others came to know him, their view of him had altered. If he had failed to smother the recollection altogether, nevertheless its power to disturb had grown feeble.
But now a curious notion came after Tom, took hold of him and swivelled him, as he blundered among unfamiliar trees. He had assumed that Posner’s hints about Nelly’s fragility had been designed to frighten him off. But what if the dealer had been trying to protect her? From me, thought Tom, horrified. The idea was like coming upon something unholy. He fl ed from it, refusing to look over his shoulder.
He came out of the bush on the southern trail and found Nelly waiting there. She gestured at the shawl of paddocks below them fastened with the bright brooch of a dam. ‘We should search the farm. Jack-even Mick-would’ve spotted anything obvious. But they won’t have been everywhere. There could be something they’ve missed that we’d see.’
Her eyes were pouchy, the whites stained. Tom looked at her scratched hands and grimy clothes and thought, She wants a break from this.
She was saying, ‘Like there’s this old paddock that’s going back to bush with a grassy bit still in the middle. There’s so much you can’t see from the road or take in at a glance, all these tucked-away places.’
‘Why don’t you go back to the house and have a rest? I can keep going here.’
‘I think we should check over the farm. And I’m OK. I don’t need a break.’
Tom could have sworn that the farm track was empty when they first turned on to it. Then he saw that a woman was standing by the bank, in the shade of an overhanging branch. As if released by a Play button, she began moving towards them.
‘I was just on my way up to your place.’ It was the fi rst thing Denise said, as if her presence there required justifi cation. And then, ‘Hi Nelly.’
‘Hi.’ After a moment, Nelly said, ‘How you doing?’
‘Yeah, good. You?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s good. You look good.’
This was so patently absurd that Nelly smiled. At once, something invisible altered, as if a breeze had found its way into a room.