David Francis - Stray Dog Winter

Our guide’s a mermaid, said Darcy’s mother, the first thing out of her mouth all day. Now she watched Darcy, winked at him, a nudge of her cigarette in the air. Darcy stopped his sketching, returned himself to Nabokov and tried to ignore the captain’s cursing and the rutting of the engine. In his own head, he thought how Fin had left without even calling, Benton at the prize-giving night, acting like Darcy no longer existed.

He put down the book as they anchored in a cove off an island, climbing down into a dinghy. His mother with her sun umbrella, whingeing about her lumbago and how the doctor had told her to stay on her back, Orpheus helping her, confused, and Darcy felt embarrassed at being here. He’d always felt himself different but never privileged.

They splashed through warm shallows and traipsed across a deserted driftwood beach, dugout canoes as if planted for effect, the late afternoon, a trail through the rows of coffee plantations and coconut palms, heading to a sing sing , a clearing with huts and a small crowd of native women in dry grass skirts, breasts drooping to their waists. Isn’t it marvellous? said Darcy’s father.

His mother rolled her eyes and Darcy looked at Orpheus, aware of their imperialism. A man up a tree with a mask like a toucan, native men appearing from the forest. At first, Darcy thought they had bloodshot teeth because they had bloodshot eyes, or because they’d just eaten raw meat, then he realised it was something they were chewing. Betel nut , his father called it. Orpheus tied his cloth differently now so it sagged like a loose-pinned nappy, open as his smile.

Darcy’s mother threw a stick at Darcy, told him to watch the limbo competition.

His father held the broom. One woman got so low her back touched the ground; one of her breasts got caught on the broomstick. Darcy’s father’s face gleamed peculiarly as he flipped the stick so the bosom fell down beside her, almost to the dirt. The native men laughed, the betel nut red on their teeth. Darcy’s mother shook her head and sat bored in her folding chair, lit a cigarette. Darcy went for a stroll. Orpheus followed as though it was his job to ensure no one strayed and then they stood together nervously behind a hut.

Orpheus put two fingers to his lips and touched Darcy’s nose with them, returned to the festivities as if nothing had happened. Darcy’s mother stood up carefully, folding her beach chair. She put her hand in the small of her back for support. Chronic she called her lumbago, but Darcy’s father had insisted, as if this weird trip would make her forget about Fin. She carried her gin and tonic in a thermos and took Halcion. She told Darcy halcyon was really a bird that floats in its nest on the sea. She sometimes pretended her bed was a nest and after she swallowed a tablet she went on voyages. She said it felt better then.

As they walked four abreast back through the plantations, small plots of taro and sweet potato, Darcy wanted to reach over and hold Orpheus’s hand, stay here on the island, away from these stupid white parents. But Orpheus walked with his broad feet bare in the leaves, his twisted hair and red stained teeth, walking as though they’d not had their moment.

The natives must think your father’s an idiot, said Darcy’s mother as if his father wasn’t with them. Dressed up like Albert Schweitzer, gawking at their women. An angular dog with a gash on its flank sniffed along behind them. Darcy’s mother shooed it away with her folding chair.

I think it went well, his father said, in his rah-rah voice. Everyone seemed to like us. He didn’t notice the betel nut spat all over his safari shirt. Orpheus said nothing. Darcy wanted to give him the sketch inside Lolita .

You didn’t include Darcy, his mother said.

Darcy’s father looked at him, almost surprised. You had fun, didn’t you, son?

Darcy nodded but not at him, held the book to his chest. I was doing my own thing, he said.

You certainly were, said his mother.

When they got to the beach and Orpheus said goodbye, Darcy wanted to tear out the sketch but he didn’t. His father was plying the boy with Australian notes, explaining the coat of arms, the emu and kangaroo.

It was almost ten in the evening when Fin took Darcy out to see jazz. A concert held in secret, she said, because jazz wasn’t sanctioned in Moscow. They glided up endless escalators, through marbled caverns of an opulent underground, tentacles probing the skin of the earth. Fin seemed edgy again. But what did you actually tell him? she asked.

Nothing he didn’t already know, Darcy said. Even though it was probably true, an itchy disloyalty slipped over him.

Did he want to have sex in the end? she asked.

Darcy wasn’t sure if it this was a joke, sex in the end , but she didn’t look like she was joking. She wore black and her make-up was subtle, no flashes of colour tonight. He was too busy showing me the museum, he said, and the half-lie buzzed about his mouth like a wasp. I’ll still need to get some pictures of the buildings. The shapes were interesting, that rocket spire, and the pavilions.

A cluster of workers trundled down the other side of the escalators. Their jutted brows and wide-set eyes came and went between the bronze-encased lanterns that hung from canopies like fruit bats, a muted waterfall of cast-down faces. At first Darcy wished he had his camera, then he just wanted to be where there was light. He thought how it would be stinking hot in Melbourne.

Out in the night he extended an umbrella for Fin. The Sports Palace loomed, a dark iceberg lit blue in the distance, but they headed around the back of the station, past drunks who leaned on each other for balance. Fin covered ground without appearing rushed, cut abruptly between prefab concrete high-rises, structures bathed in snow, poorly lit, windowless, unearthly. They wove through patchy darkness, down a concrete stairwell to a bolted red iron door. Fin knocked in a rhythm.

People like us can ruin things like this, she whispered. The lock was wrenched and they slid inside, the mouldering smell of an underground place. Fin shoved roubles into a palm that extended from the shadows and they stepped down into a spare, smokeridden basement where a small crowd sat on rugs and cushions spread along cement ledges that rose up like opium beds in front of a makeshift stage. An upright piano stood as something holy. The mood, so suppressed and intense, surprised Darcy, giddied him. Guys with button-fly Levis and long hair smoked papiroses ; one wore a baseball cap, another wore a bandana and tongued his woolly-sweatered girlfriend. Darcy was suddenly keen to be here, behind the veil of the culture, the curtain behind the curtain, but where was Aurelio now?

Look comfortable, said Fin. She removed her hat and mussed up her spiked hair; she didn’t mind being noticed now she was inside. Darcy took off Aurelio’s coat and looked about at the people in every available space, arranging pillows and sheepskins to protect themselves from the concrete. A couple nearby on a raggedy couch drank vodka, and a tape of Thelonius Monk played Straight, No Chaser from a yellow boom box that sat like an animal on the piano.

Darcy squatted beside Fin on some kind of skin with faded chartreuse cushions, her fur hat now beside her like a sleeping black cat. Darcy reached for one of her Gauloises and lit it. She’d said you can tell foreigners by their imported cigarettes.

A man with a ponytail took the boom box away and as the lights dimmed Darcy caught Fin watching the door. A latecomer in thick corduroys and a long leather jacket edged his way along their makeshift row, ran fingers through a shock of jet-black hair. Jobik. What kind of name was that anyway? Fin quietly picked up her hat and Jobik crouched beside her, then sat. He put on his glasses and gave Darcy a wink that prickled Darcy’s skin.