Chapter 29
They sat through dawn at the peninsular school. The sky went through its technicolour changes before the sun appeared in a blink of a puffy cloud. The schoolyard looked much the same as it always did, a huge square cow-turd fallen from the sky and dried where it landed. Splaat! The bitumen was cracked and crooked lines of weeds grew at will. Along the fence huge gaps were torn in the wire and wooden posts that held it all together needed paint.
‘The gentle visitors to your mind will not be coming to this place.’
The school building itself was the type that existed in pre-war Sydney, blue-black liver brick, and small multi-paned double-hung windows with wooden squares blocking the view, and red tile roof.
A scum of salt plastered everything in sight. A sad greyish domain for the children of the peninsular, the school began abruptly at the coast road. At the rear, the yard bled into the reserve, over a crushed wire fence that had long since grown into the ground.
There was no child in the yard. Windows and doors were shut. A few cards strewn by a local security firm littered the verandah mat. The only sound of schooldays was the flagpole halyard flapping in the wind.
‘It’s a peaceful land.’ said Rane with mellow passion.
‘It is.’ agreed Juno.
‘It’s been cut away from the rest of the world since it split the Gondwanaland scene. It’s the most unrelated land on Earth. When the rest of the countries were bubbling and crashing into each other, this one sat apart, you know, immobile, and arrogant of what was happening to the rest of the globe. It’s been washed over by the oceans when the ice changed shape. It hid under a wall of water for ages and didn’t mind a bit. Then she surfaced and sank again and after a few more million years she came up for air and then ... she handled it! Imagine that, eh? Flat as a pancake and nary a murmur as she went under for the umpteenth time. At least that’s how Max has it!
‘After all that, she’s hardly changed shape. She’s got a few more layers of rock where the mines have dug and a bit’s been washed away over the years but basically she’s still the same and that’s been a great comfort to the people who’ve lived here for thousands of years.’
They strolled the deserted schoolyard. He told her of George, the janitor, and of the old man’s tales of artefacts and drawings. He described his initiation in the cave, of the timeless nether world of his imagination. He laughed with her as he drew pictures of Stafford Wentworth and Leonard Marx, but he withdrew as he remembered those who laughed at him.
‘You’ve never spoken of Aborigines, Rane.’
‘Why should I?’
Juno kept quiet.
‘I’m nobody’s spokesman, spokesperson, spokes in the wheel!’
‘Yes! I know that!’ she snapped too quickly. He was being droll. ‘You don’t joke much.’
Rane lowered his head and appraised her through his eyebrows in a quaint gesture of mild mockery. Then he threw back his head and laughed as he did when they first met on the beach.
‘You’re curious, aren’t you!’ he accused her with a grin.
She flung a feigned fist at his forehead and as he ducked she curled her arm and embraced his neck. He looked sheepishly at her from the cradle of her love.
‘Seriously, Rane,’ she said, releasing his neck as he stretched to his full height, ‘don’t you feel drawn?’
They had left the schoolyard and were gathering coloured leaves from the ground. When their hands were full they would leave tidy mounds on the trail they had wandered.
The plastic waste of summer had vanished with the families and their caravans. Camping areas were empty and hire boats lay tired in their racks by the boatshed. It was over for another time.
‘Has it ever bothered you? Got you at least curious?’ she persisted.
Peninsular children congregated in the reserve for a final burst of energy before winter’s doldrums collected them for another year.
‘Has it ever bothered you?’ she insisted.
He was keeping curiosity alive. Then he said,
‘No.’
Juno was wondering if he was touchy.
‘Why then should I be bothered?’ he asked with double meaning again.
Old people of the peninsular
pensioners awaiting their time,
out of their flats and
nurturing their shrubs.
Autumn bursts of blossoms
were gazed upon,
and loved by these gentle citizens.
These fading souls squeezed their last days
between the decay of summer
and the exile of winter.
‘Don’t you have any kinship with Aussie blacks?’
‘Don’t you?’ he replied.
‘Me?’ Juno exclaimed in bewilderment. ‘I’m from another world!’
They came upon an empty bench. Rane cleared the seat of water and they sat with their arms hooked over the backrest. The peninsular council crew were at work in the distance and children ran past and waved.
‘They know you.’ Juno remarked wistfully. She waved back at the children.
‘Aw, they’re still a bit dubious about me. If I sit still, I’m like a comic book. You can see it in their eyes when they stare at you. If I move they get pissed off.’
‘Like their image of you is more important than the real you. They don’t want to know the actor behind the movie.’
‘Yeah!’ Rane said in abstract. He looked about. The reserve was alive with good spirit as locals took back their space again. ‘The people out there on the land aren’t any different.’
‘Eh?’ Juno lifted her nose, drawing her lips away from her teeth. She held the expression for a moment.
‘I think all the people out there have been robbed of their friends, Juno.’
‘I don’t get you.’ she said as she released her nose and her lips dropped over her teeth. Her eyes were paler now as she changed mood.
Rane had been half-watching the council crew at work. They were a squiggly bunch about a hundred metres away. A laughing group of kiddies drew nearer and shouted things at the workers. A man disengaged himself from his work and waved his arms at the children. They shouted all the louder. He returned to his work. They soon wandered away and took their sounds with them.
‘I think the people out there have been robbed of their friends because their friends are the essential beings of the world. When the people were robbed of their land they were robbed of their friends.’
They watched the truck approach, its council green in harmony with the trees. It stopped a few metres from them. Two men climbed down from the cabin and went around to the back of the truck. Equipment was unloaded and laid out on the grass. A radio blurted talkback from the cabin.
One of the crew walked past with rope and piquet’s and headed for the boatshed. He was short and very fat with no hair in front of his ears. His mouth had sunk into his puffy face, like a stone dropped into dough.
‘Hey!’ Rane used his arm to draw her close. Juno rested her head against him as her mind gave over to the raptures of the flesh. There was a yearning in her spirit and a drifting of her will to the times she had given herself to him. That spot in the distance had grown into her life, growing bigger by the surf, inexorably fastening on to her fate, taking her from the water and covering her with his clothes. The taste of him under the shower and his hot force in her throat. She shivered. She burrowed into him, chilled suddenly by the bleak wind of memory.
The other council worker carried a stepladder from the truck to the sign above the litterbin. He extended the ladder carefully and climbed it. Facing the sign he unclipped a small hammer from the stud on his belt and drove a loose nail home. He then returned to the truck and fetched a tin of paint. Up the ladder again, he painted where the rocks of summer had chipped the lettering. He was slow and workmanlike, his tongue licking his lips as he brushed the paint.
‘I’m tougher than you think, arsehole.’ Juno reached into his groin and held him. ‘I’m not fickle like the groping one-eyed trouser snake.’
‘You’re always on heat, bitch!’ laughed Rane.
‘Yes!’ she also laughed. Then she broke her laughter and asked, ‘By the way, Rane, you don’t always rely upon prescience to guide your life, do you?’
She was aware of the three children in the trees. They had been glued to the prospect of watching some sex. Juno began to rub her hand against Rane’s trousers and the children, giggling nervously, seemed to be delighted by it all. So also was the spreading chestnut tree between his legs.
‘Nuh!’
The short man had returned and was packing equipment back onto the truck. The man with the paint was walking back with his ladder.
‘Sometimes I wish I could control it, you know, call it up at will, take a trip, shake out the past, that sort of thing. I’m a fairly normal bloke ... ’
Rane stopped as more kiddies were collecting by the trees and their cackle reached his ears.
‘Go on!’ Juno insisted. She withdrew her hand and poked her tongue unnecessarily at the children. They screamed with delight and returned her insulting tongue en masse.
‘What do you know about sanpaku?’ asked Rane suddenly.
‘Eh?’
The children had now disappeared behind the trees. Juno felt a flush of silly guilt for denying them their childish pleasure. She had been, for a while, an actor in their fantasy world and she had buggered it up for them.
‘Japanese.’ said Rane distantly, reciting a script from one of his dad’s books. ‘It means literally three whites. When the iris tries to hide under the top lid it leaves behind three sides of white. Sanpaku on the underside of the iris is traditionally known in the East as shit luck. Sanpaku signals the approach of death!’
‘Pity cocker spaniel owners!’
Juno forgot about children and thought of Kennedy, Lincoln and Caesar. Their eyes had been Sanpaku. In fact, she had seen plenty of people with their irises floating into the tops of their heads. They always looked so sad. Old people in the final act, dreading the curtain call, were sanpaku. So was the guy with the ladder.
He was moving awkwardly, hoisting his ladder onto the back of the truck. The short fat man was talking to him.
‘Dali’s eyes were sanpaku.’ Rane was wondering why the painter was so clumsy. He knew Juno was watching these council workers and he knew she had noticed the painter’s eyes. ‘They went that way only days before she was ... before she died. I should’ve been ... ’
The council crew were walking toward the truck cabin when Rane saw the painter’s hands. They were webbed, calloused and the size of wicket keeper’s gloves. The truck moved off.
Rane stared. Juno had her hands to her face.
‘No!’ they both screamed.
