Hare's Fur Page 2

  He met and turned right onto the track to the ledge, in a couple of minutes crossing the block’s invisible boundary and onto National Parks land. As the soil thinned, so did the bush, the blue air over the valley becoming visible between trunks. He walked out onto the ledge, his shadow scattering skinks. The lone leaning banksia that now split the view had been fed on by cockatoos, chewed cones scattered about where the trunk rose so improbably from the crack where once it had been the seedling they’d doubted could survive. Michael had grown faster, but the tree had won.

  Watching his feet, not wanting to stumble on a cone, he walked to the edge. The northern skyline was Radiata Plateau, below him the semi-domesticated immensity of the upper Megalong. A column of smoke held his gaze for a moment, then, as they always did, his eyes travelled to the small green square that had been Seth Bligh’s home paddock, and the roof set apart from the house that had been his pottery and kiln shed. He had no idea who lived there now. A succession of owners, probably. He’d sometimes had the thought that he should drive down and introduce himself, solve for them the mystery of the shards and wasters that must still litter the place, and the feet-deep midden in the gully behind the shed. Enough, if anyone had the imagination, to pave a sizeable courtyard. Russell had put that fanciful notion, but not fancifully, to Adele when a Cultural Centre and Gallery was announced for the old TAFE site. It was a lovely and loyal idea, she’d told him, but would he please, for both their sakes, not take it any further. He hadn’t. But he’d stood on the lake of grey concrete the Centre’s architects called a courtyard.

  The ledge was accessible only through his land. At the split in its southern end he halted and looked about him, without reason, but here the instinct for privacy was strong. He gripped the knob of rock on which years of her hand and his had left a low polish, dropped onto the first of the four boulders he’d placed himself as steps, and descended to the second ledge, roofed by the one he’d just walked over.

  The two urns stood half a metre apart on a low table of ferric-red flowstone. Michael they had placed at the far end, leaving room for two more. Adele was at the centre, her rightful place. Where he would stand was marked, for Hugh’s benefit, with a quartz pebble. They were his joint executors, Hugh and Delys, but Delys had told him bluntly she wouldn’t ever be setting foot here. The lid and shoulders of each pot were white with the stone powder that fell as a constant drizzle from the overhang roof. Michael’s was a high-shouldered blossom jar in the temmoku he was using back then. It was made lidless, but when he and Adele had walked into the workshop the morning after the funeral to choose a vessel into which to pour their son, their eyes had gone to the same pot. He had, defying his dislike of them, given it lugs. He wondered still if he’d attached the lugs knowing they’d be needed. Three cords of plaited copper wire, whipped at the lugs and where they met, held down the brass lid.

  Adele’s urn was the guan jar that had stood for years in the bedroom, its form not exceptional, but the subtleties of grey in the glaze, and its pearl opacity, making it one of the finest guans ever to have come from the kiln. That, too, had been a surreal morning, sitting at the kitchen table and spooning her into the jar from the plastic box in which she’d come from the undertakers’, then squeezing a worm of silicon around the rim and pressing the lid into place. He had, of course, thought about what glaze human ash might give. It had none of the fluffiness of wood ash. This was coarse and heavy, rattled against the jar’s sides. The word that had entered his mind was ‘slag’, quickly pushed away.

  His own urn he had not yet lifted from the kiln. The day of their joining he had seen, though. An autumn morning a thousand, two thousand years from now — and early, first light. The brief tinkle of shattering ceramic lost in the roar of collapsing stone, the three of them drifting down to be earth together. He didn’t believe — as Delys did — that the vision was morbid. If anything, the opposite.

  He cleaned Michael first, pressing with the point of his index finger on the lid to keep the jar steady while he brushed. The brass had grown a green patina as beautiful as any glaze.

  When Adele, too, was clean, her glaze lustrous, he stepped to the edge and held the cloth out into the stream of cold air rising from the valley and beat it free of powder with the flat of the brush, then folded the cloth and pushed it and the brush into his pocket. He turned again to the jars, and his eyes filled. He closed them, ashamed to look at her.

  ‘I know, the worst addiction, self-pity.’

  The walk to Hugh and Delys’s was thirty minutes using his short cut. He drove only when it was raining. He pulled the front door closed, glanced at his watch — ten to six — at the sky smeared with high pink cloud, then set off across the grass towards the gap in the belt of natives that was the front fence she’d planted, the bottle of merlot in his daypack bumping pleasantly on his spine. When they’d first seen this house it was alone, the road dirt, more a track, running to a lookout not maintained since the thirties. Trees now hid the view from its platform, roots had cracked and tilted the concrete. Once or twice a month a car would arrive, lured by the map, but those who got out didn’t stay long. Photographs of the lookout in its prime, however, before the first war, showed women in long dresses and wide plumed hats posed with men in tight pinstriped suits and bowlers, every man wearing a handlebar moustache. The road was now coarse bitumen, and the house was no longer alone.

  As he came abreast of the nearest of his neighbours, Helen Kent and her kids, he heard a rhythmic thudding. The son, Jerome, on his drum kit. It was the same 4/4 beat he’d heard before, seemingly all the boy knew, but he appeared to be improving, the strokes more confident. Helen had asked once if ‘the noise’, as she’d put it, bothered him. Quite the opposite, he’d answered truthfully. Adele had started Michael on the violin. He’d progressed to simple pieces before the chemo made him too weak to hold the instrument. Violin had been the obvious choice because she could teach him. But with a greater say — or any — might he too have chosen drums? There had been few rock records in the house, a couple of Bob Dylans, some early Rolling Stones and Beatles, his, not Adele’s. The collection she’d brought to the marriage was entirely classical. Oistrakh and Menuhin were the masters Michael had imbibed with his mother’s milk. He consciously listened again as he left the drumming behind. Still the relentless 4/4, using bass drum and the hard rattly one. Snare! Of course, fife and snare. The instruments of Waterloo. And New Orleans. He wondered if the boy would ever hear any swing.

  On Narrow Neck Road he walked into a light mist. He would need his ears tuned when he reached the tracks. He crossed the highway on the overpass — cars hissing below, their lights on — and descended the cutting on the concrete strip that sealed its rim. Pines made it almost gloomy enough for his torch. He found the break in the railway’s fence and ducked through and was now officially trespassing. He pushed through waist-high coral fern down to the tracks and walked out onto the ballast. The cutting amplified any train approaching from the west. To the east, even with the mist, he could see. He committed, did a fast skip across both pairs of rails. A dirt track followed the fence down to West Street, then up the lane to Mort and on past the deserted oval. The front of the house was in darkness, he was expected at the back. In the side passage he walked into the glorious smell of roasting lamb!

  The door was the original laundry’s, opening directly into the long narrow kitchen. He didn’t knock. Tom, their Maltese terrier, had heard him, though, and was waiting. He gave a single woof of welcome and danced about Russell’s feet. The air was hazed with lamb fat and, after the air outside, almost stifling. Delys turned from the sink with tomatoes in her hand. ‘Good evening.’

  ‘And very good to be spending it here.’

  He stood at the end of the island bench and thumbed off the straps of the daypack. Neither was a person who felt the need to rush to the other for the customary kiss. He extracted the bottle and placed it without fanfare on the benchtop.
Only then did he walk to her. She was slicing. She offered her cheek, and he planted a kiss. Her skin and hair, too, were lamb-scented. She pointed past him with the ancient non-stainless but razor-edged knife she used for everything. ‘Pop those in now, so you don’t forget.’ An egg carton with the added precaution of a rubber band sat on the counter beside the fridge.

  ‘Forget? When I know how badly you need the money!’

  She laughed. ‘Just do it, you nong.’

  ‘Hey!’ But he dug in his pocket and lifted the carton and left in its place a small pyramid of coins. From the pack he took an empty carton, slid the full one in, placed the empty beside the coins.

  ‘I trust, carrying those, you’re taking the sensible way home?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘But you came over the line.’

  ‘Del, as I’m at pains to point out every time we have this argument, you can hear, and you can see. You simply walk across.’

  ‘I’ll quote that at your funeral, shall I?’

  They were old sparring partners. On this subject he’d invariably faced two, her and Adele. It had been weirdly like arguing with twins — Delys, Adele — but for the fact that they looked so different, Adele small and neatly made, Delys big, with carroty curls only now beginning to grey and lose their spring.

  Hugh bustled through the door from the lounge room. ‘Break it up, you two.’ He slid conciliatory fingers along her cheek as he passed. The two men embraced, Hugh keeping his face a careful distance from Russell’s. His beard smelled of the gumleaves he’d used to start the fire. ‘It’s cool out there, old son. Soon be able to light up a kiln with impunity.’ He lifted the bottle and looked at the label. ‘We had this before?’

  ‘Not from me. The bloke in the Cellars assured me it’s good.’

  ‘Only one way to find out.’ He halted on his way to the dresser. ‘Or would you prefer to start with a beer?’

  ‘No, that.’

  ‘My sweet?’ Hugh said, displaying the bottle. ‘Or you want to stick with the white?’

  She’d finished the tomatoes and started on a cucumber. ‘The white,’ she said, not looking up.

  ‘Do I have time to show the man something?’

  ‘If you had any sense of time. Set the table, both of you, please.’

  Russell carried cork mats and placemats, Hugh the cutlery. The dining table shared the big living room. Pots — some Russell’s — sat on every shelf, filled the mantelpiece, squatted in corners. A backlog from the borer-riddled wattle Hugh had dropped in their yard was well ablaze, propped on two molten chunks of ironbark. Even from over at the table Russell felt the heat. The gooseneck lamp in the corner was off, but the board and pieces were set up on the low blackwood table, their two chairs drawn up ready. Both returned to the kitchen for further orders.

  They were family, there was no palaver of pre-dinner snacks. Hugh bore in the roast, Russell the cast-iron baking dish of spuds and pumpkin, Delys the salad and gravy. The salad bowl, gravy boat, and plates were a Gulgong proto-porcelain called Ming 60, long ago mined out. Russell had never liked or worked in porcelains, found them cold, but this set broke his rule. The salted surfaces had a glow, flame-paths were flashed a subtle pink. He had been coming here long enough to have ‘his’ plate. He ran a finger lightly round its rim to feel the fineness of the salting, before lifting the plate for Hugh to lay on it the slices speared on the carving fork.

  He ate two mouthfuls of meat before touching anything else, then, knife and fork raised in exclamation, said, ‘Del — this lamb’s superb.’

  ‘And so is your wine.’

  They exchanged nods, and the light rift was healed.

  Hugh reached to the salad bowl and pinged the rim with a fingernail. ‘This’s long gone, as you know. But what I wanted to show you, Home Rule’s sent me a sample bag of a body they reckon flashes. It’s as fine as this, throws a bit like it. I can hope.’

  ‘What are they calling it?’ Russell asked, unable to disguise the prickliness that entered his tone. Heal one rift, he thought, open another.

  ‘Yes, they’re being a bit naughty. Hmong.’

  ‘That doesn’t even make sense. It sounds Burmese.’

  Hugh laughed uneasily. ‘If it salts and it flashes they can call it “billygoat” for all I care!’

  Hugh had never dug and processed his own clays. His reason, expressed early in their friendship, was the unlikelihood of finding a good salting body by chance, and locally. Russell had soon learned the true reason, that Hugh, though a lovely thrower, was not an experimenter, hadn’t the patience. Russell stopped inviting him on forays to creeks and road cuttings. Hugh had his clays delivered, ready to throw, to the studio door. Yet — a seeming paradox — he had always shared, even surpassed, Russell’s fascination with firewoods, the different ash colours and effects produced by different timbers. The same tree lopper supplied them both. The upper Mountains were full of pines past their prime and threatening houses or falling across roads. They jointly owned the pneumatic splitter mounted on a trailer body and towed to one or the other yard when needed. The time Hugh tripped over the dog and broke his wrist halfway through a restaurant order, Russell had completed the throwing and glazing, and they’d fired the salt kiln together. Without Hugh and Delys, Russell would have, in the first months after her death, gone mad with grief. It was Delys who quietly removed from the fridge Adele’s insulin, knowing the use it could be put to. Now she lifted the tongs and pincered a pair of potato halves and deposited them on his plate. ‘Before Hugh scoffs them all.’

  ‘I beg your pardon!’

  For answer she plucked up a half and dropped it on her husband’s plate.

  ‘They’re good spuds,’ Russell said. ‘What sort are they?’

  ‘“Scoffs”!’ Hugh snorted.

  She ignored him. ‘Dutch Creams. You can get them at the co-op. Nicer than Pontiacs. I think, anyway.’

  When they were eating again Russell asked, not out of politeness but genuine interest, what she was working on. She was, or had been — would fully retire if she could finally get publishers to believe her — a freelance editor, exclusively of non-fiction, for preference history and biography. He too read no fiction, having decided early in life that real people and events were far too interesting to bother with the invented.

  ‘A biog of Ho Chi Minh. A translation from French.’

  Russell smiled. ‘Is there anything in it you didn’t already know?’

  ‘Quite a bit, actually. The writer’s Vietnamese.’

  ‘Did you know he was a potter?’ Hugh said.

  ‘What?’ Russell flicked his gaze from one to the other. There was no telltale smirk. ‘Really?’

  ‘No,’ Delys said. ‘But he kept a lot of potters in work making and firing those giant urns they buried rice in to hide it.’ She opened her mouth to add something, then clapped it shut and stood and grabbed up the empty salad bowl. ‘You two start, I’ll bring dessert.’

  She was at the doorway to the kitchen when Russell realised what her awkwardness had been. Urns.

  Hugh switched on the lamp and bent the neck to shrink the pool of light to the perimeter of the board. They didn’t use a timer. The game fell into its usual pattern of rapid, almost automatic, opening gambits followed by a slowing as their styles and strategies diverged. Delys brought them stewed plums and cream. Each man received his bowl distractedly, one eye still on the board. But they were not so distracted, or unwise, as to forget to murmur thanks. She stood a moment and studied the position of the pieces but offered no comment. In all the years he’d known her, Russell had never seen her play. It frustrated Hugh that she preferred to read. When the two of them travelled, she played to stop his badgering. Russell had learned not to ask after their return from a trip how many times she’d beaten him. She laid an affectionate hand — or was it ‘good luck, my sweet, you’re already in t
rouble’ — on her husband’s nape, then went to the fire and took up the poker and hooked the backlog forward into the ember, hunted the dog from her chair.

  Hugh’s playing was learned, Russell’s intuitive. Neither commanded a habitual superiority. And one of them usually prevailed. But after two hours the game was a futile pursuit, the black king defended by a rook and a few hapless pawns, the white by the same number of pawns and a knight. ‘Quits?’ Hugh said. Russell nodded. Hugh reached to the baize-lined box sitting on the sill and set it on the table.

  Delys marked her place, and all three adjourned to the kitchen. Hugh went to the machine, she filled the jug. Russell perched on a stool. Hugh made two strong flat whites while Delys brewed Hugh a camomile. Not sleeplessness but his bladder wouldn’t permit him coffee at night. Seeming not to remember that he always said the same thing, he said, ‘I don’t know how you two can do it.’

  Delys slipped Russell a wink. ‘A solid early addiction, my darling.’ Russell laughed. But for him it was close to the truth. Seth Bligh had despised tea, kept a once-blue but thoroughly blackened enamel coffee pot permanently on the stove in his workshop.

  Hugh was yawning behind his fist. Russell drained his cup. ‘I’ll head off.’

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s any point offering a lift?’

  Russell shaded his eyes to look through the room’s reflection into the yard. There was moonlight on the leaves of the black bamboo beside the workshop.

  ‘Your brew’ll power me home.’

  He embraced each. Delys said, looking into his eyes, ‘She’s still very much in our thoughts.’