Rose Leopard Read online

  ‘Vince.’ It is Francesca, elegantly attired in an ebony suit with shoulder-pads. ‘It’s time to go now. To the cemetery. Family only, okay? We thought that for the best.’

  I remain motionless.

  ‘Vincent?’ Now Bernice, wet-eyed and older-looking. She glances at the children. ‘You go in the first car. Katherine, God bless her, would have wanted that.’

  A vision enslaves me: I see a precise hole in the ground, silk ropes, the coffin lowered, the crunch made by handfuls of tossed dirt, more meaningless recitations from Long Gown, more crying eyes, a crushing weight … the unbearable heaviness of being. Then that big word swims into my mind: burial. And it’s too final, stinks too much of closure, closed over, caved in, airless, dingy and dense, oppressive, an end. End-point, end-game, burial.

  Blink, blink. HOSPITAL. SILENCE.

  ‘I’m not going,’ I tell them all.

  Pause for reflection: family agog, Francesca turning away, Bernice staring wildly. In the distance, a plane buzzes, dips and sways like a roller-coaster.

  ‘Vince — you have to!’ Someone is shaking me desperately but I cannot see who. In fact I cannot see any of them when I say grandiloquently: ‘You bastards can bury her if you like. But I never will.’

  Then I sit on the hot cement and stare at nothing.

  One

  You’ re not going to like this,’ says Stu quietly, ‘but I think you need to start writing again.’

  We are sitting outside on the veranda. Bougainvillea and jasmine compete for the walls in crushing lines. It is nearly night-time and the insects are symphonic. Our familiar, favoured quilt of stars begins to seep into the day. Inside the brightly lit farmhouse, Amelia is reading a tale of droids, magneto-blasters and p-shoo! p-shoo! to the children. I can see the three of them nestled on a couch, warm, shapeless and together, like animals in a burrow. Milo is wearing a blue t-shirt with a gaudy surfing motif on the front.

  It is the same shirt he was wearing when we took Kaz to the hospital two and a half months ago. Each day he has insisted that the shirt be washed and ironed so that he can wear it again. A few days ago, I caught him bare-chested beneath the clothes-line, watching intently as the wind ruffled and tangled his blue t-shirt.

  ‘Mate,’ I said to him, ‘it’s cold out here. Go put a shirt on. Please.’

  ‘I will,’ he answered, his gaze remaining fixed above. ‘As soon as it dries properly.’

  Stu pours beer into his BIG mouth, gasps, wheezes, clears his throat in the manner of a nervous bureaucrat about to report a downturn in profits.

  ‘Vince,’ he insists, ‘I think you need to start writing again.’

  ‘Fuck you, O Agent Foul’ I am brisk, clipped, ruthless. Onto my sixth stubby.

  ‘Come on. For once, hear me out.’

  ‘No. No way. Get stuffed. Stop being so functional. Just shut up and enjoy the view.’

  He sighs, pulls another stubby from the esky that squats between us and twists the cap.

  ‘There are reasons,’ he continues. ‘Good reasons …’

  ‘I said no.’

  ‘Hear me out —’

  ‘Stu!’ I turn on him, shove my face hard into his personal space. ‘Give it a rest, BIG boy! I’ve told you and told you and told you, I’m through with writing.’

  ‘Vince —’

  ‘No! No-no-no! It’s finished, Stu. The dream is over. No more half-done stories cluttering up my hard-drive, no more trendy experimental paragraphs, no more navel-gazing characters twittering about nothingness. Got it?’

  ‘I don’t —’

  ‘No more wanking myself over obscure words, no more crappy units for even crappier textbooks, no more saying I’m writing magic realism when I don’t even know what that is’ ‘Look, some of those stories weren’t too bad —’

  ‘No more deluding myself that somewhere, somehow, some effete little tosser will read my over-blown prose, feel sorry for me and actually want to publish it. It’s finished Stu, gone, kaput. The nadir has landed, alongside the eagle. Got it yet? Comprendez? I’m finished. No — more — writing!’

  * *

  I mean it too. See, it’s all a matter of symbiosis. The opening of a new document, that initial, scintillating juggle of words and phrases, the lyric creation of person and place, the seductive stretch of narrative construction that has lain highway-like before me; these are all acts that are irrevocably associated with Kaz. I hesitate to use an obsolete term like ‘muse’ but it’s true that I did abandon the stifling career path of appointment / security / promotion / grope an office-girl / be the sad-arse who runs the Social Club / superannuation / retirement because Kaz encouraged me to do so. She actually believed in me — despite having read the first draft of Pears Amid Paradisio.

  ‘It’s an allegory,’ she said, in the same tone of bewilderment that one might say ‘it’s a girl’ or ‘it’s a gigantic tumescence.’ The pages lay dishevelled before her on our best Mexican-style bedspread; fifteen months of my selfish agony, 92,439 torturously selected words — including must-have favourites like apotheosis and apotropaic — any number of potentially apot-ropaic life-moments lost to plot-dreaming and cranial overload.

  ‘It is,’ I agreed happily. ‘Perhaps I should include that as a sub-title.’

  She tap-danced her lips with long, disarming fingers.

  ‘Do you think people will be … okay with this?’ she asked eventually.

  ‘Um, what do you mean?’

  ‘I’m just wondering if it’s not a little discomforting in places.’

  ‘Kaz, this is Literature. Literature with a capital L. It’s for people who can read and perhaps think a little. Admittedly they are the minority in this grand and noble country, but there’ll be no discomfort for those with discerning minds.’

  ‘Literature with a capital L?’

  ‘My magnum opus, dear wife. My raison d’être. My pièce de —’

  ‘Okay, okay. So, let’s see if I can discern. These pears are representative of temptation, kind of like the apple in the Garden of Eden? Is that right?’

  ‘Spot on. Bearing in mind, of course, that pears are a much more overtly sexual fruit than apples. Apples come from Tasmania and no one has sex there. It’s too rugged-up for sex in Tasmania, hence their declining population.’

  ‘Vince, you’re babbling. Shut up a moment and listen.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Okay. Now, the voluptuous negress called Everywoman is representative of Jesus?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘And Paradisio is like Heaven, except everything is corrupted because this weird, hippie-style God left Everywoman in charge and she was seduced by the aforementioned pears.’

  ‘Right again. See, it’s easy — for someone with a discerning mind.’

  ‘Mm.’ Kaz unfolded her elegant legs, came around behind, enveloped me in a hug that was surprisingly fierce.

  ‘It’s kind of clever,’ she said carefully, ‘but don’t you think that all this could be taken the wrong way?’

  ‘No. Of course not. How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, remember your readers. Apart from putting all practising Christians offside, this book has a woman deliberately and maliciously messing up the Kingdom of God. There goes the feminist vote! Worse, the woman is black — dreadful tokenism, Vince! — so you’ve lost the race vote as well. Worse again, you’ve happily gifted her with enormous boobs, described in one hundred and one different ways, I might add, so you’ve cruelled the sex vote too. Vince, you’ve alienated most of your potential audience. The only people who won’t be offended by this … this allegory … are white, masculinist, flat-chested rednecks.’

  ‘Most of whom can’t read anyway,’ I added gloomily. The muse was, as always, dishearteningly correct.

  ‘Exactly.’ She nibbled my ear affectionately. ‘So, keep the allegory idea — but maybe it’s time for a re-write?’

  I miss my muse. When somebody close to you dies, everything becomes weird and binary. There is brigh
t light juxtaposed against an utter darkness, a pain which wrenches at your entire system cast against a bleak, nerveless calm. You oscillate: you can be the most sought-after star in the night-sky, observed by all and cosseted by their sympathy; or you can retreat into the soft comfort of memories, shuffle through the mind’s filing cabinet and find moments of joy and togetherness, other snapshots, some heartening, some appalling.

  After the funeral, after my refusal to go to the cemetery, Bernice stayed three days. She drifted around the farmhouse, touched objects that I had always petulantly regarded as ours, sniffled, cooked too much food. We were polite and distanced until the final day, when she came into the barn. I had been intending to clean — scrub walls, pack rubbish in boxes, replace rusty nails. However, there was another job which needed to be done first. Just as I leaned down to pick up the shears a shadow fell over my forearm. I glanced up and there she was, framed against the sunlight.

  We paused for reflection, then I hurled the shears hard into a small wooden crate.

  Tears pricked Bernice’s eyes.

  ‘Time for me to go,’ she said tightly.

  I said nothing. Instead I took a hammer, placed the top on the crate and began smashing nails into place.

  ‘Vincent —’

  ‘I’m busy!’

  I kept hammering, harder than necessary. The banging and ringing echoed madly throughout the barn.

  Eventually I finished. The crate sat before me, ready for disposal. Sweating, dishevelled, angry, I looked up — and Bernice was still there.

  ‘I … I don’t like to leave the children,’ she told me after a moment. ‘Poor little mites. It’s going to take them — all of us — a long time. Has Francesca spoken to you yet?’

  I shook my head. Outside, some witless arthropod was buzzing in the long thick grass.

  ‘We’ve been talking,’ said Bernice. Despite her imperious tone there was an unusual quaver in her voice.

  I stood and waited, shifted the hammer between my hands.

  ‘I know it’s only been a few days,’ she continued, ‘and it’s going to be painful, but Vince, you have to start looking at options. The children will need stability, more than ever. I’d like … why don’t you talk with Francesca? She has some good ideas.’

  I said nothing — because no response was required.

  Bernice bit her lip, hovered closer.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to say … I could never condone —’ she began but then stopped, as if the impending words couldn’t tell it all, not properly. Even now, I thought, she resents me, resents my disorder, my fractured and immediate lifestyle. I am, I suppose, the antithesis of all that she values — a certain ethical solidity, routines, the innate capacity to be dependable. How she must have agonised when she realised that Kaz believed so whole-heartedly in our love.

  ‘The children will need their family,’ she said softly. ‘They’ll need the, I don’t know, security of all of our love.’

  I nodded.

  Bernice sighed. ‘They are always welcome,’ she told me, and we both knew that my absence from her sentence was deliberate. The light flitted sideways and her unmasked face spoke volumes to me: I reared my daughter as careful and controlled — you encouraged carelessness and now she is no longer with us. I hold you responsible.

  ‘You are not responsible,’ says Stu now, sitting here with me on the veranda.

  ‘I might be,’ I tell him. The embers of self-doubt are easily fanned into fires of self-damnation and I’ve had two and a half months to consider and reconsider my actions.

  ‘Bullshit. I’ll bet she doesn’t really think that. Vince, it was bad luck. Rotten karma. You are not responsible’

  ‘But I didn’t take it seriously. It was just a cut — or so I thought.’

  ‘Come on, you heard what Garten said. Streptococcal Toxic Shock — one chance in a hundred thousand! Rarer than a pregnant dodo. Mate, you are not responsible!’

  We are silent for a moment. Inside, Shimeoc the Arch Droid has finally recaptured Conquistadon and Amelia is carrying my sleeping children to their beds. I stare at the shimmering constellations, locate Sirius easily then Orion.

  ‘Find Perseus,’ I command, pointing vaguely east. ‘He killed Medusa, didn’t he? Very bodacious, don’t you think? Slaughtering a Gorgon is an especially bodacious act.’

  Stu sighs like an old shell.

  ‘Find Perseus,’ I tell him once more.

  Frannie did speak to me about my options, later that same day. There was a grey closeness about the afternoon that had settled uneasily over us. She was clipping Kaz’s roses but delicately, as if she was scared of being pricked by the thorns or stained by a single granule of that thick black soil. She chose a number of flowers, snipped their stems precisely, slid each one into a bucket of water.

  I watched, fascinated. Frannie’s movements have always seemed so deliberate, planned well in advance. She has always looked the same age — somewhere indeterminate, between the late somethings and the early something elses — worn the same styles of clothing, never been seen without the same systematically applied mask of make-up or been smelled without the same citrus perfume. Once I asked her to get rid of her perfume because I was scared it would seep into my clothes, even my skin, and we’d get caught. Sometimes, on hot days, she reeks like an orchard after a storm; a smellscape of blasted, weeping trees, split fruit, nectar and syrup leaking across the earth’s cracks.

  ‘I thought I would place these around the house,’ she said to me, absorbed by the task. ‘Her favourite flowers; one in each room. As a sort of symbolic gesture, I suppose’

  I nodded. No doubt it was sincere enough but at that point in time I didn’t really care much for symbolic gestures. I was more interested in getting our ‘discussion’ over and done with.

  ‘Bernice said you wanted to speak with me’

  She looked up, totally composed, face betraying nothing. After a moment’s consideration, she leaned down and placed the secateurs next to the bucket.

  ‘As a family,’ she said, ‘we need to think about the children. I know it’s early, but their futures are paramount. Something like this … the sooner we can get them settled into useful routines, the better off they’ll be.’

  I had been leaning against the brick wall. Her presumption that my children’s current routines were somehow not useful made me move closer. There was an old tyre swing hanging from a tree; I straddled it, metronomed back-and-forth.

  ‘Forgive me for asking,’ said Frannie carefully, ‘but is everything okay … financially?’

  Ah, I thought, always the accountant’s wife. How typically pragmatic.

  ‘Due to hard work and sacrifice,’ I told her in a flat, unemotional voice, ‘we own the house. In addition to this, my parents left us certain investments. We’ll be right for a few months yet.’

  ‘Plus child endowment payments, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes. Exactly. Thank you for reminding me of those.’

  She sighed and said: ‘I’m sorry, but you must see — I had to ask. Anyway, it’s the children that we need to talk about. As I said before, their futures are paramount.’

  I dug my heels, stopped swinging.

  ‘I suppose there would be a number of options,’ I said casually, playing the game.

  Then her shoulders lifted and her eyes widened and she launched yet another it’s-only-my-opinion-but speech at me: The children — my children, I kept thinking ruefully; those pinpoints of sunshine and genetics that Kaz and I and no one else had created — could stay here (but of course that would be lonely and sad with too many memories of their mother and how on earth can you get any proper psychiatric help or grief counselling in a backwater like this?); alternatively they could come to the city and live with us or even with their grandmother (which, when you think about it, is a much better idea either way because we can offer them support and guidance and there are some lovely schools in the area, St Pat’s or Sacred Heart or even the alma mater St Christabel’s,
all very solid with impressive parent lists and excellent values in place and besides, an arrangement like that will give you the chance to re-gather yourself and there are many more jobs in the city because you’ll need a job, a steady stream of income is so important for the children’s futures); or there is one other option which is not really my preference but I’ve been asked to put it to you so of course honesty and good manners demand that I should and anyway that option is that Amelia has said that she wouldn’t mind living here for a while and looking after the children (which she would be very good at, she’s such a compassionate girl and it’s true she’s been quite unhappy at school where she doesn’t feel that her art-work is valued in any way — not that I can understand her paintings either, very bold, too strongly coloured and strange sorts of demonic figures everywhere — and she is constantly clashing with her father), but I’m certainly concerned that it is not necessarily the right role for a girl of her age and there would have to be conditions laid down to do with responsibilities and payment and I really think that two to three months would be more than enough because this is just a time-out and she will need to complete her education at some stage, even if it is non-compulsory.

  She stopped, gulped in some of the cooling air. A few blanched strands of evening fog drifted into the valley.

  ‘So, what do you think?’ she asked.

  Lots of things, in no particular order. I told her about how I did have a real job, at least by my definitions (which may not be in accord with hers or those of her bug-eyed Gorgon mother but they worked for me and more importantly they had worked for Kaz), and for us the single most important factor in all of this was closeness; it’s a matter of proximity, I said, meaning that this is the house that we chose for our family and I think it would be totally, unnecessarily disruptive to remove Milo and Otis (yes, I know their real names but I prefer these, okay?) after they’ve just lost their mother. Francesca was pale and swaying slightly but I continued regardless. I told her that proximity means being close to someone (and there is a concept you may have trouble with, dear Frannie) and I think it’s essential that the children have access to their mother’s everyday things and the places she walked and the bathroom where she rinsed their hair (but lightly, like she was a curator treating a sacred parchment dredged from antiquity) and her side of the bed, still moulded to her shape, where they lay after nightmares and let her wondrous fingers stroke away the ghouls of their young imaginations. They need to know that she is still here because I can’t ever lose her and neither can they — that would be unfair to all of us and whilst this will never be a shrine, it will be a place where her life will be constantly, unashamedly celebrated. I told her that they were staying; they’re our kids, I said, no other bastard’s — our kids and Kaz would expect nothing less than they stay with me in this house, our home: sandstone, bluestone, boxbrush, sandalwood, our temple of togetherness.