CI continues its serialisation of The Illness and the Cure

(START AT THE BEGINNING, CHAPTER 1)

‘I’ll not let him be! He is a bloody ratbag!’ She said it in English and Arabella stared at her.

‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t know, but I’ll curse him until I blow the roof of his house away.’

Arabella said; ‘My first singing teacher taught me to choose happiness.’

‘Paah to your first singing teacher! Your first singing teacher. Thank you for the advice. You who show the scars on your face. You who the fascists nearly killed. You can choose to hide your face behind your hair, to flee to the other side of the world, but I take the other path. I choose vingança. It gives me more pleasure by far.’

Saying the word vingança Isabella pulled the corners of her mouth back and bared her teeth.

‘It does you no good,’ Arabella said.

‘Aaiee!’ Isabella bellowed. ‘Vingança fits me like a glove! You should try it. I’ll not bottle up my poison. I’ll pour it out over this man who takes my boys from me. You! You go upstairs and go to bed. Go hide! Let me alone to fight the Guterres-Bragas’ battles.’

‘No,’ Arabella replied quietly. ‘The Guterres-Bragas don’t hide.’

**

But my grandmother says ‘Love is stronger than grog, can convince you to build a house in a volcano’s mouth’

Cathal Brett mourned Yong-bae in the Korean way, as she had showed him she had done with her parents, and in his own way. He offered boiled rice and soup to her spirit on the beach in the mornings and in the evenings, and he wept. He wept until he didn’t know where the tears came from, and then he wept more. It was as if something had snapped inside, and every time he moved he could feel its jagged edges grinding.

Then he had built the biggest most magnificent opulent carved in marble monument, with one of those jangsungs he’d seen in Korea on top of it and the stonemason thought he had gone mad when he showed him photographs, and he probably had. He had to hire the mason from Bairnsdale and he charged a small fortune to do it but he did a beautiful job. And it was mounted over her grave. He had words inscribed on it:

‘Ever my flower, my beautiful Yong-bae, tormented in life, now at rest.’

Sure it wasn’t the best line ever written, but he was in no state fit. He placed flowers on Yong-bae’s grave every day he could manage for the first year, when he wasn’t in Melbourne, even if they were only those dry yellow wildflowers that grew by the side of the road. He filled his life with driving back and forth to Melbourne, Parliamentary sittings, rattling about his empty house. He wondered what it would have been like with Yong-bae still in it, with her watching him as he came home from Melbourne, her with their baby, the baby crying in that quiet house. It would have only cried a little bit, he knew that, because she was so quiet and made everything calm just by being there. He wondered what it would have been like with her there with that baby. He would have gotten her to come back to ballroom dancing, sure they could have got a sitter. He would come in and she’d kiss him and they’d have a meal with kimchee and sake and the baby would be asleep in its little bed and afterwards they would make love. That’s how it would have been.

He would pick anything of hers up and it would take him back to her, as the scent of her wrapped around him and pierced his chest.

Towards the end of that year he became involved in the movement against the war, and that was when they started calling from Canberra. Would he speak at the Moratorium? Would he give up his seat in Victoria and come and work on the Federal campaign? It was surely time for a change.

He hedged his bets. He was tempted but had the strangest feeling that something was about to shift, that something new was going to come into his life, that out of all this bitterness something new and beautiful would happen.

On the first anniversary of Yong-bae’s drowning, he performed a little ritual on the beach. He burned incense and planted all the sticks of it he could find, about fifty of them, all around on the sand. It was getting on toward evening, and he stood there in the middle of all those glowing sticks of incense with the seagulls cawing and the smoke drifting into the scrub and the waves washing in ever so soft. Some of the lads were down there drinking, Dave Wallis and Johhny Wheels and that crew, and they wandered over to see what he was up to. He threw handfuls of rice into the sea and the seagulls swooped on the silver grains as the sun slipped down.

‘I feel I now understand what those priests were talkin’ about,’ he was saying as he watched the seagulls. ‘The mystery of suffering. We are born to suffer and suffer we shall. In that, you have been my teacher, Yong-bae. And so I should be forever grateful. You have taught me this much. I suffer therefore I am.’

‘What are you doin’, tryin’ to burn the joint down?’ Johnny Wheels said, breaking into his thoughts.

‘It’s just a little ceremony, lads,’ he said, turning to them.

‘Don’t come near us with your little boong ceremony,’ Wheels said.

‘I wouldn’t dream on it.’

‘Whatcha say?’

‘I said I wouldn’t dream on it.’

He spat in the sand and squinted at Brett. ‘I wouldn’t dream on it,’ he said. ‘Smart arse. You’ll keep.’

They laughed and made some other comment he couldn’t hear and then they went on their way. That night he slept and that’s all you could say.

It was the day after that he was walking to his office in town and he saw Arabella.

*

She stands in a strange but somehow familiar home by the sea. She hears gulls and feels seasick. Their calls are not the same as the gulls of Lisbon and Oporto, but she knows them anyway. Her room, recently vacated by cousins she does not know but for photographs, overlooks the bay. It reeks of fish from the cannery, but as consolation she hears the sea; it bobs into her like a life raft. She lies on the bed and sleeps. Her bags still have their tickets on them from her journey.

Luzo had packed his own bag and left for Melbourne within days of Paulo’s departure, leaving the room vacant and Isabella three quarters demented by her losses.

‘Come Arabella,’ her aunt called, waking her at a quarter to seven in the evening. ‘We’ve no time for despondency. I’m hungry.’

Arabella yawned and came downstairs and joined her aunt in the kitchen. Together they cooked dinner.

This is costeletas de porco com porto,’ Isabella told her.

‘I think I have eaten this at home,’ Arabella said.

‘No. Not possible, menina. I made up this recipe in Australia. Up in the Snowy Mountains while you were still a little criança in the old country. This is Australian Portuguese food.’ She swung her hips. ‘A little bit of this and a little bit of that.’

For the first time in weeks Arabella smiled.

‘First, we season the pork chops with salt and pepper, and some of these spices. It is my own mix. There, the garlic crusher, one clove is enough. Maybe two, to keep out the vampires, eh, and there are enough bloodsuckers in this world. Brush on the crushed garlic and the juice of the lemon. I’ve already squeezed it … over there, querida, in the cup. Melt the butter now, and sauté the tomatoes until they are nicely soft … Take them off now, they shouldn’t turn to slush. Put them in this dish and keep the pan on for the ham.’

The aroma of their cooking drifted into the street, and people noticed. A few stopped to smell the air.

‘How thinly do you want me to slice the ham, tia doce?’

‘Very, between paper and cardboard. Closer to paper. Absolutely good. And now into the pan. Just a little cooking of the ham, until it is heated through and picks up the flavours of the tomatoes. It smells, doesn’t it? Good. Now take it off.’

A small group of people gathered outside the house as, for once, the wind was blowing uphill and the street was not choked with the stink of canned fish.

‘Now, menina, add the pork chops. Lovely. Cook them doce, be careful not to burn them. Your tio Alberto, this is his favourite food, after squid in its own ink.’

‘Are they done?’ Isabella asked.

‘Yes, enough. Now the chops are done, place them in the baking dish. Good, thank you. Would you pour me a drink, menina?’

The women paused in their work and Arabella poured them both tumblers of Port.

‘Saude,’ Isabella said, and they clinked their glasses. ‘Or, as they say in this country, fundos acima.’

Arabella put the bottle of port down on the bench and burst out laughing.

‘They don’t say that?’

‘Believe me, menina, Australia is peculiar.’

Arabella laughed and tears sprang to her eyes.

‘Your father tells me you are a singer?’

*

‘What is this smell?’ asked one man, joining the people in the street.

‘It reminds me of Burma.’

Something had reached them all, a sensation that floated out on the salt-tinged evening air, pricked by the tang of melaleuca in flower. Even the schoolteacher Dalgleish managed to smile, his calculations set aside for the moment.

‘It’s lasagne,’ said Tomani, ‘like my grandfather from Naples used to make.’

Their faces were uplifted as stars poked holes in Heaven’s floor. Then a voice floated out to them through the kitchen window, a luscious voice that took to wings and soared above them, now not from the window, now from Heaven, settling on their heads with the starlight, across the evening air, travelling the length of the street past the cannery, out to the beach and over the still night water where the fish had ceased leaping, out into the dry bush where the night creatures were waking, over parched paddocks where the dams were pits of dust.

They could not understand the words of the song because it was Portuguese, or Creole if they had known that word, but they knew somehow that it was about them, about their lives. It made them laugh and cry. Children danced, their dungy faces lifted up to see who was singing, what record the old lady had put on now.

Isabella said nothing immediately Arabella finished her song, but stared at the floor and slowly wiped her eyes. After a moment she said in a small voice; ‘In the pan used to cook the chops, tip now the cup of double cream and the port we have already got out. Good. Now we wait. We wait and wait like good wives of fishermen. We cook it slowly until it is reduced and thickened. When that is done we add back the tomatoes, ham and some cheese over the chops. Yes, this is Australian cheese, but no matter. Turn the oven to 350. Good, menina. Pour the sauce over all, make sure it is all covered, and bake until the sauce is brown and foamy like the ocean that takes away everything we love and gives us all we need.’ Her voice grew faint.

‘That in the end destroys us.’

After their meal Arabella went to her room, and was considering going to bed when she heard Isabella shouting in the sitting room.

‘Tia, what is it?’ she called, and rushed down the stairs. All the lights in the house were out but for a grey glow emitted from the television. Isabella was shouting at a man in a suit speaking about something Arabella could not understand.

‘What is it?’

‘I curse this man,’ she shouted, pointing to the television set.

‘Who is he?’

‘He is a lying vilão!’

‘Let him be.’

‘I’ll not let him be! He is a bloody ratbag!’ She said it in English and Arabella stared at her.

‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t know, but I’ll curse him until I blow the roof of his house away.’

Arabella said; ‘My first singing teacher taught me to choose happiness.’

Isabella stared at her, open mouthed, then drew herself up and said; ‘Paah to your first singing teacher! Your first singing teacher. Thank you for the advice. You who show the scars on your face.’

Spit flew as the words exploded from her mouth. ‘You who the fascists nearly killed. You can choose to hide your face behind your hair, to flee to the other side of the world, but I take the other path. I choose vingança. It gives me more pleasure by far.’

Saying the word vingança Isabella pulled the corners of her mouth back and bared her teeth.

‘It does you no good,’ Arabella said.

‘Aaiee!’ Isabella bellowed. ‘Don’t tell me what does me good and what does me no good. Vingança fits me like a glove, thank you very much. You should try it. I’ll not bottle up my poison. I’ll pour it out over this man who takes my boys from me. You! You go upstairs and go to bed. Let me alone to fight the Guterres-Bragas’ battles.’

She disappeared into the kitchen and burrowed into cupboards and Arabella stood in the sitting room, trying to make sense of what the man with silver hair was saying about the game of dominoes and South-East Asia. In the distance she saw starlight playing over the surface of the bay. She felt very tired and the sensation of seasickness swept through her again, and again the torturers were with her, piercing her body, grunting and sweating and laughing.

Isabella returned with a black pot of water steaming and bags of dried leaves and sticks. Arabella recognised herbs.

‘You,’ Isabella repeated. ‘You go upstairs. You don’t want to see this.’

‘No,’ Arabella replied quietly. ‘The Guterres-Bragas don’t hide.’

Isabella stared at her for a moment then quickly turned to her bags of herbs.

‘Nightshade,’ she said, dropping blackened leaves into the water, looking up at Arabella.

‘Monkshood, wolfsbane, mandrake, the Devil’s nettle. Aha, you little darling. The withered white rose.’

‘Teasel is useful,’ Arabella said, not looking at Isabella, and her aunt glanced up at her.

‘Of course. I had forgotten.’

She went back to the kitchen and returned with a bag of stiff, prickly white sticks, watching Arabella out of the corner of her eye.

‘Teasels,’ she said, and dropped a handful in the pot.

Arabella walked out the front door and returned in a moment, gingerly holding a thorny uprooted plant, its flowers bright purple. ‘Scotch thistle,’ she said, and added it to the broth. ‘Vingança.’

‘Quickly now,’ Isabella said pointing to the television, ‘while he is still there.’

The women faced the screen.

‘May choking come on you,’ Isabella said. ‘The sea cat and death-strangling to you.’

‘May you be mangled by the sea that bore you,’ said Arabella.

‘The treatment of the boiled, broken little fish to you. And may you go and live in that place where the fishes and sprats live.’

‘I give you to the Devil, and may you find no rest because of your sins.’

‘May you go hopping to hell.’

And together the two women took the black pot of herbs and splashed it over the television screen. With a spitcrackle and bang the television shorted and they were in darkness. White smoke rose around them, illuminated by a sudden rift of starlight. All you could hear was their breathing and the distant cry of a seabird and the waves, lapping at the edges of the land.

*

Her songs were the most beautiful you ever heard. Lovely. Her voice was clear, sonorous like a bell. She could hold a note for minutes, it seemed to me, although of course it wasn’t the length of a note that drew me in.

I came back and listened night after night. I asked her in the street maybe a week later what they were. Summoned up the courage to approach her. She was wheeling her bicycle along the footpath, outside the shoe shop, and I walked up to her. At that time I thought her frightening. She wore black and her hair hung over her face, and those scars. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. She hid behind her hair, talking in Portuguese to herself.

‘Excuse me. Miss Gutters.’

She stopped and looked at me, and the intensity of it all. I stopped dead. My heart jumped and I had to look away. I fixed on this table full of shoes and kept looking down at them after that. Her eyes were the most marvellous shade of green I’ve ever seen, they were deep, almost glowing, and wiser than anything else about her would have told you. The black clothes that made her look like a student from Melbourne, the slender lines of her body, the sheen in her hair, it all made you think she was not much more than a child. That mysterious smile.

‘Those songs you sing,’ I said to her. ‘Sure they’re beautiful.’

‘They are songs,’ she said, and her voice was like honey. Melifluous. The smile again. I wasn’t sure if she blushed, because her hair fell over her face, and I was only looking out of the corner of my eye. She turned to keep on her way.

‘Wait,’ I said, and the word came out more desperate than it should have, ‘What do you call them?’

‘They are shoes,’ she said, looking where I was looking and I thought she was having a lend of me.

‘The songs I mean,’ and I looked straight at her, hard as it was.

‘Mornas’, she said, resting her hand on a pair of boots.

‘Mornas,’ I repeated. ‘They’re beautiful. They’re like, they’re like pain and sorrow and happiness all rolled together,’ I said.

Silence fell over us. She tilted her head. She stood there, the smile playing at the edges. She said something in Portuguese and my eyes wandered to the scars on her face. She glanced down at where my arm used to be and stepped back.

‘I thought I’d like to see you,’ I said at last. It was something to say.

‘People always say things they should not,’ she said, and she turned and wheeled her bike away, leaving a faint scent of something I couldn’t grasp floating on the air. A spice.

‘One shouldn’t,’ I said and watched her go. She looked back from the kerb and raised her hand, almost a wave, then mounted her bicycle and rode away.

*

I took all these calls from his office, from Canberra. They wanted me to resign my seat and move up there. Your man himself called me and asked me after he saw Hansard and one of my speeches. He said the Party – the country – needed me. I was wasting my talent in Spring Street.

No more senseless deaths, he says. Come to Canberra and you’ll be in the heart of it, man. You can make a hell of a difference here, he says to me.

‘Not with Labor in Opposition,’ I say.

‘You’re in Opposition in Victoria anyway,’ he says. ‘Bolte’s rusted in down there. And we won’t be Opposition after the election,’ he says. ‘We’ll be forming Government.’

Sure as that, it’s like he knows.

‘We need people like you. You’re a good man. I’ve read about you.’

My stomach goes cold. There’s power for you. I saw it from Spring Street, and how much more it would have been from Canberra.

I said I wouldn’t resign, at least not yet anyway.

‘What good are you in Opposition in Victoria, man?’ he asks me.

‘I’ve got commitments here,’ I say, and I see Arabella crossing the street, wheeling her bicycle out of the shadows, or Arabella standing on the beach.

‘We’ve got a lot of work and we need people like you,’ he says.

People like me. I shiver.  ‘Let me think on it,’ I tell him, yet he persists. So I agree to go to the Moratorium.

‘You won’t just go there,’ he says. You’ll stand there with me and you’ll talk to that crowd.’

So I go to the Moratorium. I agreed to it. When I meet your man under a palm tree in the Treasury Gardens he nods at me and he thrusts out his right hand like he doesn’t know and I twist my left and clasp it. He looks embarrassed.

‘All power to the left, Mr Cairns,’ I say, the standard response.

‘Call me Jim,’ he says, ‘call me Jim.’

And that was all. But I had on my medals and his minders suggested I stand close for the cameras and that I watch the crowd. If it was for me to take a bullet I probably would have done it.

It was some sort of commendation for the movement to have a Korean War vet standing up there with them against the war. I had not the least shadow of a doubt in my mind about that. He was a wonderful, terrible speaker. He held the crowd in his hand and you really thought the world would change. The Australian people couldn’t let this go on. Then he asks me to take the stand. I am very nervous at first and nearly trip up on the steps, but one of the minders says to me to not even look at the crowd. They spread all the way down Bourke Street; it looks like a hundred thousand souls.

‘I’m here today,’ I say, ‘to stand up against what I believe is a great injustice in this country.’

I’m thinking you could hear a pin drop but perhaps I just fancy myself.

‘I … My name is Cathal Brett,’ I say. I clear my throat. ‘I’m the local member for eastern Victoria. You probably haven’t heard of me, but … that … that doesn’t matter now. We’re all comrades here.’

The crowd laugh and I feel they are warming to me.

‘I fought for this country in Korea, fifteen years ago,’ I say, ‘in a dirty war made up by politicians. I believed, as so many of us did at the time, that I was fighting for, for something grand. For a great ideal. I believed you should listen to authority. That authority was always right. And I paid my price for it. But I’m not here to say we shouldn’t be in Vietnam because war is bad.’

I see two of the minders look at me, as if they think I’m off beam and I’m not going to say what they want, and maybe they should pull me off the dais. Burly fellas, but I’d a given ‘em a run for their money. No matter, I’m warming to my subject. A hundred thousand faces are turned to me, a bog ignorant Irishman from Connemara, and I’m starting to enjoy it.

‘This war in Vietnam is a bad war. There is no justification for napalming villages. Believe me, I have seen it. I saw it in Korea, and it is a sin. And I don’t mean that in the religious sense, begging your forgiveness, Father.’

They laugh.

‘It’s a sin against life, against all of mankind, against morality, and it degrades those who do it nearly as much as those who are burned. This war in Vietnam is a civil conflict, between north and south. Believe me,’ I say, putting on the blarney, ‘to be sure I know about civil wars.’

The crowd roars.

‘And,’ I shout, ‘believe me, there are no winners. No losers. There’s only the dead and the living. There are those left standing at the end of the show and those lying on the ground. The only victory is life.’

The crowd like that all right.

‘Yet our Government in Canberra is trying to tell us that we should conscript young men, who don’t even have the right to vote, and force them to kill or be killed. Better to fight them there than here. And how will the Vietnamese get here, Mr Prime Minister? In sampans over the open sea? This government may be all the way with LBJ, but if they think they’re going to sail here in their open boats sure they’ve been out in the sun too long.’

The crowd roars again, and I must admit the hair stands up on the back of my neck to hear it.

‘I say when the authorities make a bad law, it is our duty to break it. Australians are not sheep. We threw out conscription twice during the First World War. And yet this government brings it back in without so much as a whimper and sends boys without the vote off to die in some Asian rice paddy.’

I’m getting worked up now, and I shout the next line.

‘THERE-NEVER-WAS-THE-WORSE-USE-MADE-OF-A-YOUNG-MAN-THAN-TO-SEND-HIM-TO-A-WAR!’

I stop and take a breath and the crowd goes apeshit.

‘Vietnam is another politicians’ dirty war, don’t you forget that for one minute. I don’t accept that even you, Prime Minister, believe it any more when you talk about reds under the bed. We have an immoral law, conscripting our young men to kill and be killed, an immoral war in South-East Asia, and a government that must be opposed. The authorities are wrong, so we as a people must stand against them. We must stand together and say no to this war. And if you have a draft card, I say burn it. It’s your duty. Burn it and tell the government you’ll keep burning them till these eejits come to their senses or are thrown out of power!’

Believe me, the crowd liked that, but I’ll tell you if you don’t know it already they were already sold on the idea before I started. When I stepped down off that stand all I could think about was Arabella. They said I looked so calm and cool, slappin’ me on the back and shakin’ me by the hand, your man even offerin’ me his left hand this time, but inside I was frozen. It wasn’t the crowds of people surging forward to see us, or the cops with their batons, or the suspicion of a sniper. I was totally afeared of losing that beautiful girl from a town named after a fortified wine.

*

Arabella the beautiful. The damaged girl from Iberica, he called it, whose love songs broke and then deepened his misery. Cathal Brett thought she could make his life whole again. Iberica. He liked the word, Iberica. It had a beauty about it. Sure he thought of Moorish castles and marketplaces in the open and orange trees in blossom and fellows climbing into their ships to discover and conquer the world and bring back silver and gold. He stood outside her house every night for a week when he first heard her sing. The waves lapped at the beach and for some deluded moments he believed she was serenading him alone. He soon realised just how pathetic that was. He stood there or sat in his car waiting to hear that singing again.

He could just see into the yard of the old house where she lived with her aunt, ivy clinging to broken statues, bamboo gone rampant, the yard choked by weeds. A chink of light peeked out from under the shutters. Her songs took him to Iberica. That first time he sat in the car, crying in the shadows, with the windows down so the inside didn’t get misted up, with a crowd standing outside in the street as well, listening to her sing and smelling the food those women were cooking.

Of course he was careful how things looked. It wouldn’t do for the party, that sort of coverage. Politician has breakdown, he could see it in the papers.  Arabella’s songs were shining and terrible and they drew him in to her.

He had to go there and prod all those old wounds and break them open and look inside them. The songs did that. And of course then it became Arabella herself. That mysterious girl from Iberica. The way he’d see her on her bicycle around town, doing the shopping, her strange hat about to fly away, her black hair falling into her eyes. The scars on her face that seemed exotic.

Exotic. Sure he was always drawn to love damaged women. He’d be in the field when luck was on the road.  He was alone. He’d pass her in the street and his stomach would kick and he’d break into a sweat. He didn’t know much about her or about Portugal. He thought himself bog ignorant.

He met her again. You could hardly avoid one another in a town the size of the Port. He heard her before he saw her. He was in the newspaper shop glancing at the headlines after the Moratorium, shooting the breeze with Wallis, who was a queen’s man God bless his poor misled soul – he even had a picture of Your Majesty above his counter. He didn’t hold the Moratorium against the Politician, and Brett didn’t hold the portrait against Wallis.

Then he heard a language coming from behind a rack of newspapers. Not offensive language, but foreign, one he didn’t know. It was being whispered out forcefully, and he stood listening. It made the hair stand up a little, like someone had just walked over his grave. He realised how beautiful it was and that it was her. It was words like those he’d heard her singing. He moved around a little to at least get to look at her, and Wallis became busy serving someone else. Around the corner of the newspaper stand there she was, crouched down, back to him, magazine in her lap. She was all in black, and she seemed to be repeating the same words over and over, like some kind of chant. It filled him with a type of dread for he’d heard chants for the dead before, and that’s what it was. He moved closer to see what it was she was reading, but she noticed him and froze him out. She snapped the magazine shut. Even her poor hand, he thought, even her poor hand holding the page is scarred.

She put it back on the shelf quickly, smoothed her hair with one hand and stood. She turned and he was in her way to get out of there. She didn’t quite look at him as much as through him. Those pools of green eyes. He smiled at her but got no response.

‘Nice day,’ he said, realising how utterly stupid it was to say something so banal.

‘Yes, it is a nice day.’

Her voice was soft and quavery and he saw her eyes were red, not that she’d been crying, more like an absence of life. Like the light had gone out. He stepped to one side and she brushed past him and he could have reached out and touched her. But he didn’t.

She left the store and he believed he loved her.

*

Sure I have this recurring dream. I’d be eating a peach, the juice running down my chin, and I’d be in the orchard where they grew in South Australia or somewhere warm. I didn’t know that as a certainty, but the sky was deep and blue, not like an Irish sky, and there’d be sometimes buildings in the distance, farmhouses of warm, sand-coloured stone and what not. I’m working next to a lovely, firm-breasted girl, and we’re picking peaches and putting them into a bin. She has a beautiful smile, her hair pulled back behind her ears, and we stop work and stand under the shade of the peach tree and eat fruit together. Her lips soft and warm and inviting, like the cool breath of a breeze. The sun falling down on her shoulders and a trickle of sweat between her breasts. I am there with her, just her and me alone, and we lie down on the grass in the shade of the peach trees and I roll on top of her. We kiss, her mouth tastes of sugar, and I kiss my way down her breasts and stomach and lift up her dress and run my face up her thighs to her sex. It is as sweet and overrun of vital juice like the peach, sweet as life itself.

And then afterwards we lie back on the grass and she starts eating another peach and she’ll pass it to me, soft and warm, and I’ll bite into it and it will be full of barbed wire. My mouth clamps down around it and I can’t spit it out. The blood starts pouring out of me and I’ll try and scream but I can’t. The pain would be bad, but not as bad as the fear of it all. My guts turns cold and sometimes I’ll wake in a sweat, for I’d look at the girl and she’d a turned white and be lying there, transformed, deathly, quiet as a mountain.

My grandfather used to say you can’t learn to swim on the kitchen floor. He was full of them little truisms, sitting in the corner of the kitchen there by the turf fire smoking his pipe. And there she was wheeling her bicycle in the street and I stuck my heart back down my gullet and walked right up to her. I told her I was touched by her singing. She stopped and fixed me with her eyes, beautiful green things like new leaves. It was like looking at Yong-bae. My stomach did a loop. But she misunderstood me.

‘That is not my fault,’ she said.

‘No. I mean, I like it. Your singing. It does something good for me.’

‘Oh.’

‘You’ve a beautiful voice.’

‘Yes. Thank you. I sing for many years.’

‘It’s nothing like anything I’ve heard, ever heard before. It’s beautiful.’

‘You would have liked it if you would have heard my mother sing,’ she said. ‘She was the most beautiful singer in Portugal.’

‘That would be on the Iberican Peninsula.’ Now I thought that would impress her.

She looked at me and offered the suspicion of a smile. But then she moved her bike to one side and made as if to continue on her way. So I fell in next to her and walked along.

‘I was wondering if you would like to, well I don’t know. Well you know, go for a picnic, or what not.’

She didn’t speak. I stole a glance at her and she was looking down, hair over her face like a funeral veil.

‘I wouldn’t do that,’ she said. ‘I don’t. I stay at home.’

‘Could I come and visit you at your house?’

‘You would want to?’

‘I’d like to hear you sing. To hear you talk. I’d love to. In fact. I’m interested in Portugal. I’m interested in … you.’

I said it in a small voice but she heard me all right. Still she didn’t speak but I stayed in step with her. I noticed several people watching us in the street. But I didn’t care.

‘Nice speech,’ Furness said to me, stopping to shake my hand. It threw me for a minute. I thought he was being funny about my approach on Arabella.

‘You made a speech,’ she said after Furness was on his way.

‘Yes. At the Moratorium. Against the war.’

‘My cousin is at Nui Dat.’

‘I know. It’s not our war. We shouldn’t be there. Not one soldier.’

I thought for some foolish moment I could make a grand anti-war speech and it would get me into her bed. I could tell her the story about my arm, the hero I was at Hill 355. Stroking her flesh. In heaven via the power of fine sentiment and loose words. I let the thought pass.

‘You’d know about war.’

She doesn’t look at my missing arm but I know it’s what she’s talking about all right.

‘I do some. True.’

‘You could come and work on my garden.’

‘I’d love to.’ And me never having taken an interest in gardens in my entire shitful life. ‘To be sure. I’m limited in what I can do. But – ’

She gave me that half, secret smile again. ‘Come on Saturday.’

‘That I will.’

And she mounted her bicycle and I watched her ride away.