Stones (3 page)

After a moment, the doctor stood up and crushed his cigarette underfoot. Then he said: “I’m afraid that isn’t all.”

Bragg crouched and waited.

Col was wishing that he hadn’t come.

“There’s brain damage, too. Not anyone’s fault. Just one of those things a person can’t foresee. I warned your wife…”

“I warned her, too,” said Bragg.

But the doctor didn’t seem to hear him. He went right on talking. “There’s always a danger with the mother past the age of thirty-five. I told her that—warned her. But—” He threw up his empty hands. ”—who listens any longer?” Then he said: “I repeat. She’s a strong, resilient woman and she will recover.”

“What about the baby?” Bragg asked. “Will the baby recover?”

“Stella,” the doctor informed him, “will not recover. Of course she will not recover. No one with half a brain can recover, Mister Bragg. Your daughter, I’m afraid, is doomed. I’m sorry.”

Before he left, the doctor turned at the door and said: “You can come and see me any time you want—but not today. I’ve just spent thirty-six hours on my feet and I’m going home, now, to die.”

He was gone.

Col said: “what can I do for you?”

Bragg said: “you can take me home and let me screw you to the wall.”

Later on, Bragg went into the ravine along Rosedale Valley Road and he walked in the mud. Coming to an open space, he found a fallen tree and he sat in the rain and let the weather have its way.

Six months later, Minna discovered she had inoperable cancer of the lung.

She hung around the house for several days and played with Stella. Bragg said nothing. He’d hardly said a word since Stella was born. All he did was pretend to write.

Finally, Minna came up the stairs one day—it was early summer now—and she was carrying Stella the way she always did, against her hip.

“I’m going to leave you, Bragg,” she said.

Bragg set down his pen and put one hand against his temple to support his head. With the other hand, he turned out the lamp.

He sat on the bed and watched her for what seemed hours while she packed. He memorized her face and the way she moved and he memorized her smell.

“Where in Australia?” he asked her.

“I don’t know. I’ve never been there. Probably Sydney. They say it’s really quite civilized.”

“Go where the doctors are good—that’s all that matters,” he said. “Just be sure you end up somewhere where the doctors are good.”

“Soon as I know where we’re going to be, I’ll write.”

“What about Stella—after you…?”

“Die? Not to worry. I’m determined I’m going to find her somebody desperate as me to love her and I’ll leave her there.”

Bragg could only think that Minna was crazy: mad. How could a sane person speak so blithely of “finding somebody desperate as me” to take in a child who was doomed to be a baby all her life? He wanted to yell at her; forbid her to go. He wanted to turn the police and the courts and ten thousand social workers onto her case and have her restrained. But how could a man do that to someone like Minna? All Minna wanted was to do good works in love.

In the long run—judging from the myriad of sources stamped on all her cards and letters—Minna had taken the whole of Australia to be her safe, good place:
almost as rewarding
, as she wrote to Col,
as taking up residence in Parkdale
.

She was a faithful, if somewhat spotty correspondent. Weeks could go by without a word. She was in Brisbane; she was in Cairns; she was in Adelaide; she was in Perth. At the end, she was in Sydney. And in all these places, she walked with Stella on her hip and in all these places she made what she herself called a raft of friends, though none—as she confessed to Bragg—as desperate as she for Stella’s love. Still, this did not deter her. Right until the very last month, she was on her feet and walking.

One time, she wrote to Bragg and said:
I wonder if I ever told you why I called her Stella. Not for the sky-stars, my dear, but for the stars she holds in her fists: the six-pointed stars of Stella’s hands.

Another time, she wrote and said:
six fingers bad—five fingers good. That ring a bell? Get out your Animal Farm and read. We’ve been bamboozled far too long into accepting there can be no acceptance for those of us with four legs
.

Finally, she wrote and said:
I may have them here in Sydney. Childless as you and me for all those years—and they love her, Bragg. Their names are Viv and Charlie Roeback—comfortable as two old shoes. Charlie looks like Sidney Green—street playing Doctor Johnson. Viv looks like a mountain moved by faith. And they love her, Bragg. They love her
…

Thank God, however, they did not—apparently—love her desperately. So, at least, they appeared to be realists.

It was only in the last of all the letters, written just before the cancer and its necessary regimen of heavy, incapacitating drugs finally forced her to lay down her pen, that Minna mentioned Nob—
the sad, mad poet of Sydney
—with whom she had shared a house before she went into the hospital to die.
He’s a great, tall, crazy man who spent some time in an asylum for depression, she wrote. Just my type. Tell Col he writes about the noises in behind the eyes of bears; he’ll understand. I’ll always love you, Bragg—but I love this man a little, too. I’m even going to be cruel enough to say—because I have to, don’t I, tell the truth? Crazy Stan Nob would have given me a dozen babies—drop of a hat, Bragg. Drop of a hat. Farewell
.

And that was all.

The next letter came from Viv and Charlie Roeback, saying that Minna was dead and they had Stella, safe and sound.

When they got to Sydney, it was Charlie Roeback who met them. Bragg had never seen a man so large. It required, in the restaurant, two chairs side by side to hold him.

Bragg and Col had come down slowly from Cairns to Brisbane to Sydney, taking their time to seek out all those others Minna had cultivated: the Minna Joyce Conspiracy. They also took the time to stare at the hordes of rosella birds and cockatoos and cockatiels and the wading ibis and the jabirus and the tiny, crazy peaceful doves, no longer than a box of cigarettes. In a zoo, when they saw a duck-billed platypus, Col remained silent. All he could think of was Minna, shouting at Bragg in the living-room below him: MAYBE I WANT TO GIVE BIRTH TO MONSTERS!

And now they were in Sydney, where they had come to say goodbye to Stella and to scatter Minna’s ashes on the heights at Ku-Ring-Gai.

Bragg, in the aeroplane above the Pacific, approaching San Francisco, turned on the memory projector again in his mind and rolled the film.

Three men walking up the hill, and down at the bottom Viv and Charlie Roeback waiting by the car with Stella lying in the shade.

Stanley Nob’s sweating green back had reached the top and he was turning this way and that with shaded eyes to see where they must go.

Bragg, arriving out of breath, could hardly stand up straight he was so out of shape. He clutched the box of Minna’s ashes to his breast and patted it reassuringly several times. “It’s all right, now,” he said. “We’re here.”

Stretching out before them and receding through the shimmering dust and heat, a great plateau of rock surrounded them on every side. Stone waves rolled beneath them, dizzy-making if you looked too far afield.

“I think,” said Nob, “it’s over that way where she wants to be scattered.” And he began to walk away from them, making for a place unseen beyond the low-lying scrub that was everywhere in evidence.

Bragg and Col set out to follow him, but almost at once, Col stopped in his tracks and pointed down at the rocks.

“Look,” he said. “Petroglyphs.”

And, indeed, there were. Rock carvings—deep incisions—God knew how old, of beasts and fish and birds. And men.

“What are these, Nob?” Col asked.

Nob called back: “the Aborigines put them there. We don’t really know just when—but long before the white men came.”

The patterns were all quite similar. As Bragg and Col went forward over the rock face in Nob’s direction, they encountered, over and over, the shapes of turtles, birds and sometimes snakes. The “beasts” turned out to be giant platypus. And everywhere, in a context with the animals—or totems—there were etchings of stick men and women—the sexes plainly and even grotesquely limned with oversize phalluses and breasts.

One other feature ran consistently with the rest. There was always a moon—though never full. This moon was always in its quarter phase and it always shone in the sky directly above the figures of the men and women.

“Over here!” Nob cried. “I’ve found it.”

What Nob had found was a curious variation on all the other petroglyphs.

For sure, the snakes and the birds and the turtles and the platypus were all in evidence—just as the moon and two stick figures, male and female were equally in evidence. But here, there was also another figure—of a kind that had not appeared before. It was a human figure—yes—but not at all the same as the others near which it had been carved.

This human figure had long flowing hair—and the way it had been carved, with multiple streaks and lines, the hair appeared to be white and possibly the hair of an albino. One arm was stretched out sideways, one arm was held down flat against the figure’s side. One leg was longer than the other—and the shorter leg was resting on a sort of triangular shoe, or little box.

“What does it mean?” Bragg asked—expecting Nob to answer with assurance.

But—“nobody knows,” said Nob. “There’s been all kinds and every sort of conjecture. Most archaeologists think its a shaman figure—maybe a witch. It’s female, at any rate.”

Bragg looked down at the magical figure cut at his feet and a curious, worrying noise set up in his mind: a kind of racket, like a buzz-saw carving trees.

Nob said: “this is where she wanted to be scattered. Just here over these figures and in the sky.”

He turned away—and so did Col as Bragg undid the hook that held the lid in place. Before he opened the lid, he kissed the box and then he withdrew Minna’s ashes handful by handful and threw them like an offering upon the stones.

The plane was now approaching San Francisco and Bragg could see the Janis Joplin girl going into one of the washrooms or—as she would say—the head. The sight of her, so Minna-like, was jarring since he’d just finished scattering Minna’s ashes in his mind.

Col said: “twenty minutes and we’re there.”

Bragg wasn’t sure he wanted that.

He could see the great grey fog that lay above the city and he thought of all the men and women living in its shadow. Here was a city, he thought, that once was the symbol of all the bright hope in the Western world. And now it was a city gripped by terror, numbed with the shock of AIDS .

We have probably come to the end, for all we know—Bragg thought—of human congress. Certainly, it marked the end of human passion as it affected homosexuals—and, more and more, it affected everyone.

All his life, he’d been taught that he was an outcast—part of a scourge upon mankind. All the offshoots of this thinking had always seemed, to Bragg, to be so ridiculous and paranoid, he’d never paid attention. Now, there were people down in that city who were dying because of sex.

He tried not to dwell on this and he put it aside.

The Janis Joplin girl came out of the head and she was barely recognizable. Somehow, she had managed a magical transformation and the cotton shirt and the frizzy hair had been replaced with a neat, black dress and a chignon. She was, in fact, quite beautiful and appeared to be serene about the prospect before her. “I’m going home, now, to be married,” she had said. “And I’m not allowed to be sad…”

All at once, Bragg went racing back in his mind to the very first day he’d realized he was in love with Minna Joyce. She, too, had worn a neat, black dress and had put her hair up thus. How long ago this was, it hardly mattered. Ten years: twelve. How wonderful she was—had been—would always be, stepping forward into their lives together with so much confidence and joy.

Dear God, he thought. I know now why she wanted her ashes scattered there at Ku-Ring-Gai. It was the joy and the liveliness—the sense of endless celebration that clung to all the figures in the rock. And the figures where the shaman stood—the very place where Minna’s ashes fell…

It was not a shaman at all
.

He knew it, now, as surely as Minna must have known it the minute she encountered the crazy figure cut in the rock so utterly and absolutely unlike all the others.

It was a child. A child. The child of the two stick figures rejoicing by its side beneath the moon. And the child had long, albino hair and one six-fingered hand stretched out for all the world to see forever—and it stood on one good leg and one short leg, for which her parents had made a loving box. Forever. And forever visible.

A shiver went down his back. And he knew right then, as he waited to debark the plane, that he would return to Ku-Ring-Gai with Stella on his shoulder. Or his hip.

A GIFT OF MERCY

When Minna Joyce first laid eyes on Stuart Bragg, she told herself to remain calm. This was back in 1975 when she was still in her waitress phase and working for a man whose name was Shirley Felton. Shirley ran what Minna called The Moribund Cafe on Queen Street West. It was really called the Morrison Cafe, because it was in the Morrison Hotel—a rummy dive for drunks and crazies, now defunct, on the north-east corner of Shaw and Queen. Minna had been working there since late July of the previous year and the reason she gave for taking such a job was that she had to keep her eye on the Queen Street Mental Health Centre, just across the road.

“You never know, my dear,” she had said to one of her park-bench friends, “what they’ll do behind your back.” Also, there was the vaguest hope that her mother—the newly remarried Mrs Harold Opie—might drift by one day and find her cast-off, screwed-up daughter working behind the counter in The Moribund Cafe—drop dead of shock and thus spare the world the continued menace of her presence. “And that, my dear, would be worth the price of admission!”

As to why Mrs Harold Opie—the ex-Mrs Galway Joyce—might be adrift at all on Queen Street, only Minna Joyce could imagine. Perhaps her cool stability was really less than it seemed and she was looking for yet another masochist crazy enough to marry her. Galway Joyce and Harold Opie had both been mad enough to do so—and, from what Minna knew of her mother’s most recent marriage, Mister Opie was already on the way out the door. But whatever the reason might be, Minna Joyce was content to believe in its probability and dream of its eventuality.