Bloke, page 7
‘Very wise.’
‘So, thanks.’
I hooked the crayfish out of the coals and let them rest. ‘Do you reckon Bob’s in on this?’ I didn’t want to believe a mate had set me up.
‘Bob’s hard to read.’
‘You’re telling me.’
‘He probably knows something’s going on, but doesn’t want to know too much. This life suits him and he just goes along – look, I don’t know. Bob’s a queer fish.’
‘Well, what about Stoker? Surely he’s not the brains.’
‘Who knows. He’s crooked enough but I can’t imagine him doing it on his own. I’ve seen avocados with higher IQs. Maybe because there’s so much money they just ride the wave … He got involved with Bruno, thought he was a big shot; he’d do anything Baras asked, he’s in awe of him. Wants the lifestyle, the power, making people scared of him. Schoolyard bully. But the disease, the ganglio, whatever it’s called —’
‘Ganglioneuritis.’
‘Whatever. It’s complicated things for them. Aunt says they’re trying to blame it on Fisheries or Customs. Protecting their back. Fur will fly, but Stoker’s the one I’d watch out for. And Baras.’
‘And all on account of fish food.’
‘You’re just being cute, Jacques, you know it’s worse than that. The stuff will wipe out the industry. Anyway, the package the police took off you is the bigger problem. The fish food just exposed the real trade. Aunt says the police have been ringing around. Few house visits yesterday. You’ll be next. They know you were on the Star.’
‘But the police took that package off me.’
‘If they were the police. They select people like you and Dad simply because you know nothing. Pay you a thousand or two, keep you sweet. Drop you in it when the siren goes off.’
Made me sound like a real dill. The conversation stalled and the silence encapsulated our beach and smoky fire.
I broke open a crayfish and pulled the tail flesh from the split shell. Steam gushed from the carapace and we stripped small knots off the white muscle and slipped them steaming and glistening into our mouths. I tried not to catch her eye. My fingers and lips were slippery with cray juice. I blushed despite myself.
‘But I’ve got a plan,’ she said. ‘How much money have you got?’
‘A few thousand, maybe five or six.’
‘Good. A ticket to South America costs $1,148.60.’
‘I don’t want to go to South America.’
‘They’re very tolerant of drug runners over there. And besides, I’m going too.’
‘Well, that’s different. La Paz?’
‘Yes.’
‘Weather’s shit in La Paz.’
‘Not as warm as here, but that’s the attraction, we can stay inside.’
I looked at her carefully and took a drink of water, to hold something in front of my face so that she wouldn’t see it hanging out. Tried for some steadiness.
‘I’m glad you’re wearing those earrings.’
‘They were a gift.’
‘I thought you were annoyed that I’d done it. That I’d tried to make you obliged or something.’
‘Well, I’ve been trying to stay clear of complications.’
‘Am I complicated?’
‘Not very. Come and have a swim. It’s getting warm in the sun.’
She took off her shorts and ran to the water and dived as expertly as you’d expect. The perfect arc of a seal.
I looped into the water but had no hope of impressing. She’d already seen my dead-fish impersonation. Seen me in the water every time we went to sea; seen me fling myself into the transom like a lump of tripe, all pale and glutinous. Two hours of immersion at depth reduces body temperature and oxygen levels to the point where muscle structure degenerates to a substance like the jelly at the top of hot corned beef.
I surfaced and turned to look at her just as she was hauling her hair out of her eyes and screwing it into a quick knot. She still had her T-shirt on but it accentuated rather than concealed. She saw me looking and I turned away, pretending I hadn’t seen, hadn’t been transfixed.
‘Well?’ Challenging me.
‘Yep, you’re glorious all right. Just as I thought.’
‘What have you thought?’
‘The way you move, even in those baggy sea pants and the clumpy jumper that Makybe Diva had as a horse rug, I knew there’d be an athlete’s body beneath. A beautiful athlete.’
‘Do you think so?’ She ran her hands over her hips, as even sensible women are inclined to do when subjecting their own body to scrutiny.
What I really liked was that she wasn’t afraid for me to see her with hair plastered to her face, didn’t turn her body into the self-conscious postures so many women can’t resist, those little cameos of suggestiveness, the old tired games.
‘La Paz, you reckon?’
‘Well, I’d already bought my ticket and I thought, he needs one.’
‘Thanks for ringing to warn me before I went to Singapore.’
‘Didn’t want to see another good man burnt.’ She breaststroked out to a small flat rock cratered by rock pools and draped in soft weeds and coralline.
‘I was touched to think someone cared.’
‘Care, James, care is what we all want. Someone who notices and cares.’
‘I noticed, I cared.’
‘I’ve noticed you noticing. I was flattered.’
‘You wouldn’t have thought so. I thought you hated me … men.’
She swam back to where I stood in the perfect jade of the bay. ‘I hate the thought of being trapped.’
‘And never being able to go to La Paz?’ We looked at each other across a square metre of ocean bay.
I stepped toward her and her jaw set, as I’d dreamt it would. Sensual and stern at the same time. This won’t be easy for you, it seemed to say. Jutting. A defiant promise. Male redbacks are killed for this.
I took her jaw in my palm, felt the muscles tense along the bone. I tilted it so I could bring my lips down to hers. Her eyes never changed their expression of wary implacability.
A studied kiss. That’s how I described it to myself in later years. An inquiry, a gentle greeting, even though it gave me an instant erection while loin-deep in Bass Strait.
She raised her hand to my neck and drew me to her so our bodies touched and I was embarrassed that within seconds of our first kiss I was imposing an obstruction between us. All subtlety seemed to be lost in the surf, any pretence of pure, considered love wedged by a crude tube incapable of hiding the dumb offering of its blood.
I glanced at her face to see if she was offended, exasperated by the predictable. She drew her face away and slid her hand from my neck, across my shoulder and down my bicep.
‘I’ve often wanted to do that,’ she said. ‘Run my hands over your arms. They’re like an antelope’s, the muscles barely contained by the skin.’
‘You kept that quiet.’
‘You kept quiet too – even though it was hanging out of your face.’
‘Was it?’
‘Like an open book.’
Her hand continued across my chest and two fingers bumped my nipple. ‘Often wanted to do that too. Fresh out of the water.’
‘What, like old suet?’
‘Colour comes back. Strong body you’ve got, Jacques, couldn’t help noticing.’
‘Thought you weren’t going to call me names any more?’
‘Can’t help it. Bit embarrassed, I suppose.’
‘Well …’ But I didn’t have any words to follow, so I lifted her T-shirt over her head in a movement as free of clumsiness as I could manage. Nearly brought tears to my eyes. I followed the curve above her hips with both hands, the T-shirt drowning unheeded behind her. The cool water tightened her skin, and my hands rose to cup each breast, the nipples blunt bosses of dimpled flesh. I brought my lips to each in turn, trying to keep my tongue out of it for the sake of some decorum.
Some people think you’ve got to squash your tongue in the opponent’s mouth and explore their entire dental-palatal structure to impress with your ardour. Jellyfish in a glass are more provocative.
But I could taste the salt on her, and my tongue licked the second nipple like you do an oyster shell, tasting the last of the brine.
‘Salt,’ I explained.
‘Let’s see.’ And she took my own nipple between her lips and then reached up to kiss me. Lusciously, deeply, and no thought of dentistry entered my head.
She brought her arms down my back, sliding her hands along my flank to the waist. I flinched, an automatic response; the nerves just leapt. She did it again to test my reaction and her lips parted in a smile. Oh, that jaw – I wanted her mouth all over me. My erection almost wedged us apart. Her eyes were laughing, amused, the lips pouting as the jaw thrust even further. Some might say it’s not a fashionable facial feature but to hell with fashion, the sight of it crippled me, there’d been times when I could hardly walk straight after seeing her smile.
And she was smiling now and her hand slipped in between our bellies and into my jocks and took a full, unashamed grip of my cock. I closed my eyes as if shot with a bullock gun. A smile could cripple, a hand could blind, I don’t think I was built for war.
She slid my jocks off, and in a deft movement of hands and hips her own were off and now we were in real trouble. Half our clothes bobbling off into the world’s wildest stretch of water.
She gripped my shoulders with both hands and climbed onto me. There was a bit of a stagger here and readjustment there, but soon she was drawing herself along the length of my cock and subsiding onto it in slow languorous strokes. My eyes were open now but I couldn’t see; I pressed my face into her neck and as she continued to rise and fall I tried to fashion a thought of gentlemanly honour and consideration of the sexual pleasure of another but fuck that, coherence disappeared like a surprised salmon.
I really can’t say what happened next. Did I stagger, did I scream, stomping around in the surf like an oceanic Scot about to toss the caber? I crashed into the water like a fallen tree. My sight returned and in a haze of tiny bubbles and streaming hair I saw her eyes looking into mine. We struggled back to the surface, said nothing while we panted like spent horses.
‘The weather’s shit in La Paz,’ I gasped.
‘Told you we’d have to stay inside.’
She led me back to the grass beneath the banksias and spread an old rug. She pushed me onto it and knelt above me before sliding in beside me, her shoulder pressed into my armpit and one leg drawn across my thighs.
When she knelt above me her breasts swung like paw paws and one grazed my chest and now I could feel it pressed to my chest. Her lips were opened against my neck, her fingers idling in my hair. I let my hand follow the great luscious moon of her hip, the scallop of her waist and at last the globe of her breast. I could hear a tiny quiring in her breath and when my fingers traced the inside of her thigh her eyes snapped open and she was at me. More blindness, heedless heaving and rolling, struggling to contain each body in the other.
I woke to light flickering across my eyes. Heaven? Just simple sunlight through the great canopy of a banksia older than most world religions.
‘When I was a girl,’ I heard her murmur, aware that I had woken, ‘I learnt a poem at school. I thought it was the most tender thing I’d ever heard. A girl and boy are sent off to gather rushes … it’s Chinese or something … but they get distracted. “We started at dawn from the orchid isle, rested under the elms till noon, You and I plucking rushes, Had not plucked a handful when night came.” I thought it was beautiful. Hoped love would be like that.’
‘Is it?’ I asked, more steadily than I felt.
‘No, my experience says it’s not.’ She rose on one elbow, the magnificence of her breasts lolling against my chest. ‘But I’ve just begun really looking forward to the weather in La Paz.’
seven
Light at Centralo de Briyas descends through grimed windows in the dome as drifts of wan evanescence, like tea from great-aunt’s strainer. Frugal, insipid tea light, teasing in its promise of false warmth.
Trains clash and rumble between platforms, people, their pates and thatches lit by pallid opalescence, stride between platforms or linger by the coffee booth. Luggage is dragged along eroded concrete, and steel wheels grind and quinch in their first ponderous revolutions and tannoys screech incomprehensibly.
The people were short and blunt, the food coarse and pale. I looked up at the dome, wondering how they achieved such an anaemic effect with the sliced meat in the only bread roll I could see. Tortillas with cool mud seemed to be the standard fare, but they presented better kissed by the pearly light.
Even so I settled for the meat roll, but once out of the cabinet it looked even worse, sponge with a slice of cardboard, no pretence of being meat. I chewed the spongy wad and returned to the booth to order a little syrupy coffee-shot in a glass the size of a thimble. I needed to fry my eyes.
I had no idea where Giovanna was and had stopped looking.
Somewhere between the Mayan ruins and several casas built by fascists from the trophies of war, I’d lost my slavish puppyishness. Bound to happen, always had in the past. I recognised the problem. Me. She had a thing with tickets. She’d balance them on her knee and refer to them every second minute, even though the train or bus or plane was still two hours away. I mentioned this to her just before the train pulled in to La Paz and her spine went stiff as an ocelot’s.
‘It’s all right, this is the right station. See, Murajas, the witch.’ Not a lot different from, ‘Look, Murajas, witch,’ but a stunningly different outcome.
We alighted from different sides of the train, or I presume we did, unless she stayed on to re-experience the sleet of Tambo Quemado. I waited, wadding the paste of the roll. My eyes bulged like a hippo and I swallowed like a constipated python. I looked about, swallowing my pride with the dough, but she was nowhere to be seen.
Her city of joy, escape, and I’d lost her. I stared into the thick glass thimble, at the slick of tar at the bottom. God, this coffee was strong. Would six amount to a suicide attempt, get you excommunicated from the Melbourne Cricket Club? The coffee stewed my eyes. Naturally they were at their most froggy distension when I saw her.
Among the crowd of bustling Bolivians she stood out as if an angel had flown in through the squalor of the dome to stand with folded wings in the great vault. Uncertainly. Fidgeting with her tickets. I swallowed involuntarily. Her hair always seemed to catch the light, creating an aureole of golden filaments, and even in the heavy coat she’d bought for its warmth and practicality you could tell she had a figure, and anyway her legs showed below it and men passing by lost control of their necks, gulped like pythons, fabricated excuses to walk past and have another look; in short, made fools of themselves.
She’d seen me, but was too proud or too annoyed to come closer. I went to her and took her hand. The one without the tickets.
‘It’s a strange country, you fuckin idiot,’ she said. ‘You have to pay attention.’
I wanted to say that paying attention for twenty-four hours while on holiday was perhaps twenty-three too many, but I was too close to tears of relief to try anything smart.
‘Let’s find a taxi, you’re embarrassing the Bolivians. They think you’re the Sun Virgin.’ Thank God for the Lonely Planet guide.
‘That’s Aztec.’
‘Incan.’
‘You made it up.’
‘No, when Cristavo Escalar first —’
‘Bullshit, and anyway I’m hungry.’
‘Bread rolls are off. You can have beans.’
She stalked over to the café booth, disturbing the devotees no end, and stared mournfully at the muddy tortillas. I took off my pack and dragged a tin of sardines from the pocket. ‘Look, Incan gold.’
She had a thing about tickets but I couldn’t travel anywhere without a block of cheese and a tin of sardines. We each thought we were the most seasoned traveller. Never occurred to either of us that we weren’t a bad team.
Until then. I kissed the Sun Virgin and several Bolivians had a crisis of faith, slopping coffee tar all over their favourite poncho.
Of course, I made that up about the ponchos. There were a few little Indians from up-country but the vast majority of travellers were just the world’s browbeaten clerks in toffee-brown suits trying to delay their arrival at the office.
But I could tell by the way they looked at her that they were imagining exactly what I’d achieved, a full-blown kiss on her gorgeous lips. I’ve told you about her jaw, the effect it has, and I could tell that for these brown clerks it was going to be a hard day at the office.
She bought some cornbread and we went outside to eat our sardines and cheese on a bench facing the massif of El Alto. This was it. La Paz. And raining. Every building streaked with damp soot.
‘Just a city, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘But we got here.’
‘It’s just anywhere. I just picked a spot. Saw it on SBS weather. Anywhere was good enough.’
‘For what?’
‘To get away.’
‘From what?’
‘Plodding. Dying as a Year Five teacher with a matching set of dinner plates.’
She’d be safe with me. My crockery came from the unbroken remnants of five dead households.
‘Is it the same? I mean, you were going to be here on your own.’
‘It’s different but it doesn’t matter, you’re all right most of the time. When your mouth’s shut.’
‘I thought that was most of the time.’
‘You know what I mean. Back in there.’
We chewed on our cornbread and shivered in the drizzle.
‘Big hill, that one, El Alto,’ I remarked, trying to talk it up a bit. We could hardly see it for cloud.
‘Yeah, steep.’
‘Sorry about the witches thing, it was a joke.’
‘Bring the house down.’
‘It’s not men and women who get on each other’s nerves, it’s partners – the ones you share toothbrushes and tickets with.’
‘I’ve always managed.’
