Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (26 page)

One o'clock passed. Then two o'clock. She wasn't coming. I'd already decided. The next time I looked up it was four o'clock. I found myself pulling kids up for things I would usually let pass. I was a black cloud circling the pool.

Then, just before closing time, without any expectation, I happened to look up the end of the pool and there she was. Usually she strode through the turnstile twirling her magisterial hands ahead of her. But this wasn't the Rosa who had shown up. This Rosa was far less confident of herself. As she came closer I saw all the uncertainty that accompanies bad news. For that is what I'd decided I was about to hear.

The last swimmer was getting out. A few more picked up their towels and made towards the changing rooms.

‘I'm late. I'm sorry,' she said.

She snuck a quick look back up the pool in the direction of Diggs's office.

‘I'll be quick. I'll be in and out before you know it.'

‘Be my guest,' I said.

‘Thank you.'

It was a strangely formal exchange. Diggs came out of the Men's with a hose in his hand. The sight of Rosa took him by surprise. As she walked by him they exchanged a nod; then Diggs turned and followed her with his eyes. Then he sought me out with a what-the-hell-do-you-think-you're-doing look. He tapped his watch. I called across the pool that everything was all right—‘I'll lock up'—and that just caused him to look heavenwards. He'd never let me lock up before. Today wasn't going to be any different. There was a light splash and we both looked down at the dark shadow moving underwater. There was something wilful and attractively casual about her decision to forego her usual bathing cap. She broke the surface, her eyelids beautifully composed, lips pursed, more pink than red. Then everything opened in her face at once. She found me on the side of the pool and smiled. Diggs rolled his eyes and dragged his hose up to the toddlers' shed at the top of the pool.

For the rest of Rosa's swim I picked up articles of clothing left behind. A sodden towel. A child's white singlet. By the time I came out of the changing rooms I was relieved to see that she was true to her word. It was a short swim and she was already out of the pool. That meant I could start the chlorine. The pump room was by the entrance to the Women's, and that's where I was when I heard Rosa call out—‘Lionel? Lionel? Is that you?' It was the voice of someone caught up a tree and slightly embarrassed to be calling for help.

I looked around for Diggs. His office window was ablaze with the late-afternoon sun. As I stepped inside the entrance of the Women's I was thinking, this is probably a sackable offence. I didn't know how I would explain it to Diggs. A woman's cry for help. That cat-up-a-tree thought. I could hear the shower running, so I called quietly ahead—just in case someone unaccounted for was still in the shed, and Rosa answered back: ‘Lionel, thank goodness. I thought I had been deserted. Be a sweet and get my towel. It's with my bag. I left it on the steps.'

I tried to be casual about it and pick up Rosa's things as I would the belongings of anyone else. This time, as I slipped back inside the Women's, Rosa must have seen my shadow on the wall and noted its hesitancy, because she called out: ‘Come on, Lionel.

There's nothing to be shy about.'

As I came around the corner I was surprised by the long view of Rosa dripping wet under the showerhead. She stood tall, her right shoulder pointing away from me, her right hand cupping her left breast. She was beautiful.

She smiled back at me. ‘My lifesaver,' she said.

As I approached she dropped her hand away from her breast and presented all of herself. She raised her arms and it was clear to me what she wanted. She wanted me to dry her—here and there. But as I moved towards her she stepped back into the shower jet.

‘If I let you touch me, Lionel, it must be for the last time.'

Touch. Last.
These are the words I hear over the shower.

Then she says: ‘I am pregnant. I am going to have Ivan's baby.'

‘Pregnant?'

She nods, her wet hair sticking to the side of her face. I have never seen her so happy.

I kneel then so she can't see me. I don't want her to see how upset I am. I don't know where these damn tears sprung from.

I start with her legs, not dwelling on but not ignoring either the rich tangle of hair. I feel her hand touch my face. She brings me higher but not so high; she invites me to drift and drift and she purrs at the place my mouth goes. The only sound we hear is the shower water and the gurgling of that water going down the drain.

34

Each of us carries our fatal flaw within. Schmidt, who was so used to doorways and glancing views—on the bus bound for Chacarita—the flower of broom clipping his eye and launching him out of his seat. Blinding him to the traffic and all consideration of safety.

Louise would have acquired some Spanish. She must have. The words that come first are always those ones which are self-explanatory.
Tipa blanco
are those trees with the black and stricken branches which in spring sprinkle white-tipped flowers over the city pavements.
Tipa blanco.
The same flowers used to stick to the heels of Louise's shoes.

The simplest vocabulary might have saved her life. On the day the lifts in her apartment building broke down she might have taken greater care had she read the sign at the top of the landing warning tenants of the slippery stairs. A distraught caretaker, cap in hand, later told the authorities that he had arranged for signs to be placed on every landing. Louise took no heed. In too much of a hurry she had stepped carelessly, the heel of her dancing shoe slipping on the edge of the step. She landed on her tailbone, her head bouncing with fatal impact against the concrete.

At a
milonga
in Almagro, Paul Schmidt sat waiting, and waiting.

Death ends all things and La Chacra was no exception.

It started with Angelo's departure. Rosa pleaded with him to stay but after Angelo resisted all attempts at flattery and, finally, bribes, Rosa washed her hands of him. With breathtaking dexterity she let it be known that Angelo wasn't such a great chef anyhow. She'd find another, this time a better chef. Angelo knew only the one thing; had just the one trick up his sleeve. La Chacra needed to develop a more adventurous menu.

A succession of chefs followed, the menu changing as many times until Ernie Buckler arrived to turn the steaks on the grill. Ernie had worked on the ferries and in canteens that fed up to two hundred at one sitting. With Ernie arrived a new clientele; most of them seemed to know ‘Ernie boy'. They shook their heads at the offer of the wine list, asked for beer, and finished with endless cups of tea.

The decline had begun before Angelo's departure but after he left a more general haemorrhaging took place. Once upon a time you'd have needed a booking on a Friday or Saturday night. Now you could walk in the door and pick a table.

Kay left for a new restaurant in town and a new position.
Maitre d'.

Rosa didn't appreciate how important Kay was until she left. By then it was too late. There followed a dizzy period where the restaurant had to weather a complete turnover of waitresses.

There was no more hiding the carpet stains, the stiffness of its fibre; no amount of disinfectant could overcome the stale aroma.

The decline was just as self-evident at the back of the kitchen. The walk-in fridge was a shrine to better times when Angelo's famous
créme caramel
sat in floor-to-ceiling trays. Ernie's deserts didn't require the same amount of preparation. The pile of dishes failed to mount to much. Quite often, and to my pleasant surprise, he cleaned his own pans.

Rosa looked tired. She looked older. Her thirty-seventh birthday came and went. She had kept the day a secret.That night she cited some vague business that would take her away from the restaurant for a few hours. I learnt later that she and Ivan had gone off to a flashier restaurant down at the waterfront.

The next night, it was near the end of my shift, Rosa visited me out in the kitchen. I handed her a poem I'd written that day. The words are lost to memory—fortunately. I seem to recall that I made something of her name—Rosa/Rose. But she read it generously, her eyes burning into the sheet of paper. She was halfway through it when I had the thought that maybe it wasn't the right thing to have done, and that in fact the poem wasn't much good. She reached the end and looked up.‘So you are now a poet and a historian—as well as a dancer?' She smiled up at me, at my youthfulness; and as if she had just caught a glimpse of all the surprises still to be sprung in me, she said, ‘Come here.' I bent down to present my cheek and receive my award. ‘No, Lionel. Here.' She turned my head so she could kiss me properly on the lips. She placed her hand against my jaw, to hold the kiss. To make it linger. Now I know it as the kiss which signals farewell; where one retains the contact in order to better remember. When we parted she said, ‘Lionel, I have some news for you.' She'd just come off the phone from speaking with Jean.

My father had gone to help an old ewe that had trapped its head in the fence line. Peter left his farm bike and managed to roll himself down the slope to where the ewe was trapped in the wire. He freed the sheep and lying on his side watched it wander away. He managed to raise himself to his elbows and drag himself a few metres before he became stuck. His legs were a dead weight. He couldn't move another inch. He tried and tried; and at some point it must have been easier to just lie there and wait.

Around dusk my mother had begun to worry. With the last light about to disappear over the hilltops she went out to look for him. She didn't get far. Soon it was dark, and she hurried back to call up the Wheelers. They came over immediately. Well into the night they fanned out over the tracks with their torches. Chrissie found him around 5 am. My father had suffered a heart attack. He was already dead.

35

The hills and sky were waiting for me. Look what you've done. Look what you did. It's all your fault, you realise that, don't you? That's what they seemed to be saying, and as I wound down the hill road to the farmhouse I felt like I was descending a hole with no way out, no way back.

My mother, the one person entitled to lay blame at my feet, wrapped her arms around me and held her frail body against me. Harry Wheeler was next in line. My father's oldest friend and neighbour laid his hand on my shoulder and with a few chosen words I felt my guilt lift and forgiveness settle in its place. Last in line, so to speak, was the doctor. He caught up with me on the phone. ‘That you, Lionel? Listen, it's not a bad way to go,' he told me. ‘Once you pass fifty a finger can reach out and touch your shoulder and over you go. That's the thing about heart attacks. There doesn't have to be any prior symptoms. It's not like a sniffle leading up to a cold.There's no warning. It picks its moment. I've arrived on the scene to a man crumbled on the floor still holding his shaver, slumped at the wheel of his truck, in the bath, halfway through a slice of toast, holding his fishing rod…'

I walked outside and breathed the farm air and stared up at the hills and sky. The sky kept moving overhead as it had always done. I looked up the hill and saw a motorcycle sketch a shadow against the hillside above the road. Chrissie was one more element waiting to fit around me.

It was Chrissie's hand I felt at my shoulder during Peter's funeral. And it was her shadow that slipped alongside mine almost unnoticed at first in the weeks and months after.

I don't recall a more brutal winter. Condensation on the farmhouse windows turned to ice in the night. Ice covered the old wheel tracks of my father's farm bike and cracked underfoot as slowly and inexorably I found myself walking into his life. Snow blanketed the tops. The air had only to make a slight shift to cut through to the bone. June, July, August, and for a week in late September, I dug tracks through the snow for the marooned merino flock to follow me down to the lower slopes. I had help, and I'd hear Chrissie whistling and shouting at her eye dog. She wasn't so shy on the tops. We'd meet back at the farmhouse; circling back by different routes to Jean's soup tureen bubbling on the stove top. When we saw only two places set at the table Jean would give an apologetic smile. She wasn't hungry. Or she had already eaten.There was never time to argue the point. She was already half out the door.

One hot December day I watched Chrissie track back to the ute from the post office. We'd been on a week-long muster and we were both feeling as fit as buck rabbits. Chrissie's face was tanned, healthy looking, healthier than anyone else's in town.Through her denim jeans I could sense her strong lean thighs. The word ‘coltish' comes to mind. I may have read that somewhere. But whoever came up with that word must have caught a glimpse of Chrissie that day. I saw the way she turned heads; and one old face from school went out of his way to stop her in the street. He was delighted to see her.When I saw how pleased she looked in return I made a snap decision.

By the time she got back in the ute I was ready to ask her to marry me. I didn't at that precise moment. The actual asking bit followed later.

It was a two-hour drive back to the farm. Once she looked across to ask if anything was the matter. I must have been feeling pleased with myself because I couldn't stop grinning.

Back at the farmhouse she picked up her motorcycle helmet to ride back to the Wheelers. She kept turning the helmet in her hands. She was reluctant to leave. And without splurting something major I couldn't think what to say that would delay her; some small talk, farm matters which we gave too grave a consideration until, at last—fortunately—Jean came to the rescue.

‘I've got a lasagne coming out of the oven in forty minutes. I've made far too much.'

She looked at Chrissie when she said that; Chrissie briefly looked at me.