David Malouf - The Complete Stories

What she meant was, she would like it for about five minutes. Any longer and she would discover all over again the things about this favourite child that exasperated and enraged her.

The way he stalked about, clutching his mobile like a small instrument of torture. Waiting pathetically for someone to call.

And when he gave in at last, and himself did the calling, the way he pursed his lips at the thing, as if it was a mouth; arguing with his ex-wife and sounding so mild and reasonable, or sweet-talking some girl he'd picked up on the train. Then, the moment he hung up, going glowery and dark again, casting about, like the bewildered four-year-old she saw so clearly at times in the big unhappy man, for some mischief he could get up to that would make someone pay.

Somebody, it didn't matter who.

She had been paying for more than thirty years.

Well, she could do without that just for the moment. What she needed, just for the moment, was solitude, and blessd, blessd routine.

Three days each week she went up to Siena for her chemo. They taped a plastic bubble like a third breast to the soft flesh below her shoulder and it fed mineral light into her at a slow run. The nausea it left her with was like space sickness. As if they were minerals from another planet, changing her slowly into a space creature who would be free at last of the ills of earth.

Well, she knew what that was code for!

Between visits she wore a holster packed with a flattish canister that for twenty-four hours a day played with the weather of her body — its moods, her dreams; filling her mouth with the taste of metals straight off the periodic table, getting her ready for the thing itself — the taste of earth.

For Siena she had a driver from the village and a big old Audi. Soft-leathered, air-conditioned. She sat in magisterial coolness, closed off from the straw-coloured, treeless hills, the vine rows where the grapes, as yet, were like hard little peas, but swelling, swelling towards October.

At intervals along the highway, black girls in six-inch heels toting fake Gucci handbags paced up and down in the dust. Some of them in skintight leather miniskirts, others in gold Lurex pants tight at the ankle. In the middle of nowhere! With nothing in sight but oakwoods or a distant viaduct, they paced elegantly up and down beside the hurtling traffic, in a tide of ice-cream sticks, paper cups, dried acacia blossom.

She watched them from the closed-off sanctuary of the car, and sometimes, to pass the time, kept count. On long car journeys in her Queensland childhood, she and her brother had watched for white horses. The appearance in the timeless Tuscan landscape of opulent, overdressed black girls seemed no less marvellous.

They came from as far away as Cape Verde and Sierra Leone, these girls, and drove out here in taxis to wait for the long-distance lorry drivers. Their managers (or so she had heard) were women: big African mammas who were also witches and used old-country spells to keep them in fear of their lives, or their children's lives, but to be doubly sure held their passports — a modern touch. In bodies that seemed entirely their own, and giving no hint of being fearful or enslaved, they walked up and down as if the dirt under their heels were the paving stones of some fashionable piazza in Florence or Milan.

She watched them. Hard not to envy, whatever the facts, the grace and assurance they brought to this new version of pastoral.

Till one of the lorries, with a whine of its air brakes, came powerfully to a halt, and the driver — the god — stepped down.

Her own body was not her own. In some moment of ordinary distraction, while she was on her knees in the rose bed pulling up weeds, or waiting idly for the kettle to boil, her mind God knows where, her body had taken a wrong turning, gone haywire, and now did exactly as it pleased. It was like being in the hands of a loony housebreaker who did not have your interest at heart. Who had moods and notions of his own. Was savagely perverse, and curious to see how far he could push you. And was there at every moment, making his obscene, humiliating demands. To get away from him she read, or rather, reread. Chasing up old friends in the pages of her favourite books to see how she or they had changed over the years, or to rediscover, with a little shock of affection, the earlier self who at sixteen or thirty had first been touched by them.

Effi Briest, who was in favour of living, poor girl, but had no principles. Mrs. Copperfield, one of the two Serious Ladies, who had always wanted to go to pieces. Gratefully she went back to them. And found herself, towards midnight, with her book in her lap and her glasses at the end of her nose, listening impatiently for the familiar clap-clap of the filter boxes and the arrival of her intruder.

She knew now who he must be.

There were woods on the far side of the village. The men who worked there these days, cutting and stacking logs, came from Eastern Europe. Poles or Yugoslavs. They had rooms in the village and sat around playing cards outside the bar. She had seen them riding through the square on top of a truck piled with firewood, their muddy boots dangling. He would be one of those. She didn't need to know which one or to see him close. She liked the idea of his being a stranger in the further sense of his having other words in his head, when she looked down and saw him gazing out over the hills, for owl, fence, distance. Of there being nothing between them but his body, either in vigorous action down there in the pool or in dreamy repose; which he did not know was being watched, and in the long hour before he made his appearance, impatiently waited for.

He came every night, not always at the same hour. Sometimes earlier — a surprise! — mostly later. There would come the clatter of the filter boxes as he brought the pool to life, and with it the quickening of her heart, which laughed quietly as she took her book up again and pretended for a moment to go back to her reading. Then she would rise, draw her robe about her, and step out on to the terrace.

Sipping her coffee each morning she caught glimpses of the pool as it shimmered and flashed between the leaves, an electric, unnatural blue. Housemartins, in their furious hunger, would be swooping for insects that danced in swarms on its surface, taking the pool's reflected light in flushes on their under-bodies. The air, down there, as it heated, would be sharp with the scent of bay.

She might have gone down to lie for a little on one of the sunbeds. It was still cool at this hour and she would get down easily enough. But where would she find the strength to climb back again?

As they moved deeper into June, the afternoons grew fiery, she could not sleep. Elbows on the parapet of her terrace, sipping cold tea, her thoughts went to a young man, Justin Ferrier, who, fifteen years before, had come out from England to be her summer help in the garden.

The son of a business contact of Gianfranco's, he was the same age as Jake and just down from Eton. Hard-working, sociable, the perfect guest.

Unused to their southern habits, he had spent long afternoons, under the low bronze sky, at work on an old 350cc motorbike he had acquired from a mechanic in the next village and set up like an idol on the terrace below her window.

Sometimes, when it was too hot to sleep, she would lean over the parapet and chat to him while he squatted like a child in his open sandals and worked, or she simply rested there on her elbows and watched. Drawing back at times in dazzled embarrassment at the intensity with which, under his flop of sun-bleached hair, he devoted all his shining attention to the mucky business of laying out on sheets of yesterday's Repubblica all the dismantled parts of the god he worshipped: chain, gears, grease-slicked carburettor, screws.