THE MATTRESS WAS lumpy and had a small crater at its centre unsatisfactorily padded out with an old North Hobart football jumper. He turned onto his side, manoeuvred his body around its contours, its wadis and plains, its inclines and depressions and ravines. Having formed himself into the shape of the mattress, he leant into her, pushing his knees up under her knees, his thighs under her thighs, and, resting an elbow on her hip, brought his hand around her, and in this way he held her. There seemed to be a deep relief to speak of so many things that troubled both of them without confusing any of them with words. She couldn’t bear to be alone. Perhaps they lay together for warmth. Perhaps they held each other against the silence. Hoping for that sound to come back. Both knowing the person lying next to them understood it never would. He could hear sleet beginning to brush the tin roof. It was enough to be warm with her. Perhaps that’s all there was. He felt an immense age. He would be thirty-four come July. They held each other without words until he heard the horn of the brewery truck at the top of the drive.
After he left she tipped the medals into the range fire. A few days later she raked out the ash, and for a moment was unsure what the melted slag in her hearth pan was as she threw it into the chook yard. Nineteen years later the great fire of ’67 swept through, taking all before it. The hop farm, now run by her son, her timber home and his newer brick home, the photos of her and Jack, all went in the flames. And over half-buried slag that had once been medals in what had once been a chicken pen a new layer of ash deposited itself. After more years passed, there grew out of it water ferns and dogwood and myrtles, until what had been the dream of Jack’s life was a forest and the forest dropped leaves and bark and branches, and over more time the ash disappeared under more layers of rot and peat and new life.
She married a younger man who was good to her and she to him, but it was not the same thing as Jack Rainbow and she had been. He died in a tractor accident and so she outlived him too.
Near the end of her life, she realised she could no longer remember what Jack looked like. Nor what he sounded like, or smelt like, or how he had held her and caressed her, slowly puffing on his Pall Malls while the snow fell outside. Sometimes she thought she smelt the smoke of his Pall Malls as she fell into sleep. Sometimes she remembered a room humming. But she could not hold the smell or the thought or the sound, and sleep was taking her somewhere deeper, ever further away. She was trying but she could remember nothing except that for a time, a short time, she had not been lonely and cold.
As the truck made its way back down the mountain, Dorrigo Evans talked with the brewery driver as strangers sometimes do, explaining a little why he was there.
They had something, he said. He’s dead and I am alive, but he had something I’ve never known.
What’s that?
He was a couple, said Dorrigo Evans.
A couple, said the brewery driver. My mum and dad, they were a couple. Me, the missus, well, we’re D-day. Every day.
He double-declutched, almost standing up on the brakes to drop the truck back to a crawl to take one of the many hairpin bends that formed the writhing road through the forest. When the road straightened out, he got the truck back into second and continued talking.
But a couple? I mean, no. She’s a good woman. But love?
Love, said Dorrigo Evans. Yes, I guess love.
The brewery truck driver pondered on it for a mile or two. And then he said: Maybe a lot of people never know love.
The idea had never occurred to Dorrigo Evans.
Maybe not.
Maybe we just get given our faces, our lives, our fates, our happiness and unhappiness. Some get a lot, some bugger all. And love the same. Like different glass sizes for beer. You get a lot, you get bugger all, you drink it and it’s gone. You know it and then you don’t know it. Maybe we don’t control any of it. No one makes love like they make a wall or a house. They catch it like a cold. It makes them miserable and then it passes, and pretending otherwise is the road to hell.
That’s it?
So she goes, said the truck driver. Where did you say you’re from?
The mainland.
Thought so, said the truck driver, for whom this revelation seemed both to explain and end an overly personal conversation.
As the afternoon flight to Melbourne banked around and levelled out, Dorrigo Evans could see the snowy mountain backdropped by a perfect blue sky through the plane porthole. The world is, he thought. It just is. Then it disappeared into white and he found his thoughts following. He held a hand out and he pushed his fingers into air, as though he might yet find that femoral artery in time.
You can feel the chill coming through from here, said a pleasant voice in the cocoon of intimacy that existed within the deafening throb of the great propellor engines. Dorrigo Evans turned and for the first time realised that there was an attractive woman sitting next to him. Her corn-blue jacquard blouse revealed the beginnings of a cleavage defined by the swelling cusp of very white breasts.
You can, he said.
And where are you heading? she asked.
He smiled.
Your hands look freezing, she said.
So she goes, he said, suddenly conscious of his fingers held outwards, pushing and shoving emptiness, coldness, whiteness, nothing.
In this world
we walk on the roof of hell
gazing at flowers.
Issa
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