Juliet sat at her bay window, which was marvellously closed in with sheltering trees. A cup of camomile tea warmed her hands, its aroma wringing the air. She sighed. To have her daughter taken from her for even a morning, with such a stupid reason as a detention, was utterly ridiculous. Juliet had gone for as long a walk as she could manage that morning, to the end of their dirt road where it intersected with the bitumen one, and had peeked through the poplars forming something of a windbreak between properties. She saw Jack closing his gate, jumping back on his bike, and pedalling off. She knew suddenly, instinctively, just where he was headed and felt afresh the pang of nostalgia for the friendship she and his father had shared many years before. Joining Mel in her ignominy was just the sort of thing Daniel would have done for her, too.
Juliet trembled as she took from a paper-lined drawer the only photo she had of her and Daniel as kids, holding it in the curtain-diffused light from the window, tracing a figure-eight around them with her fingers, a clean circle track amid the dust. What an odd time it had been, the two of them dressed for a funeral, which led to that fateful choice. To stay with her aunt, who lived with them, or to join her father overseas in Europe. Her decision to go had led to her brilliant career and the best thing that had come into her life.
Tonight, Dash would come, and tonight she would begin to let go of Mel. Had to.
‘Too soon, too soon!’ she cried. ‘Too soon.’
Would Dash stay on in Miller’s Creek? A man of the arts: of the world? The parallels, the repetition of history—the strange, maddening circle.
She lifted herself off the divan and stumbled against the mantelpiece, knocking one of the items she’d brought with her to the floor. Dizzily, she retrieved and unfolded the Japanese fan, a prop she’d been allowed to keep from one of her operatic triumphs, and a favourite item.
She went to her record cabinet and found the album the fan suggested to her. Skipping the needle to the aria she liked best, she began to sing.
Mel looked up from her doodles of fans and dresses to stare straight at Higgins. Higgins looked back vaguely, then gazed out the window. Although three kilometres away, somehow he too could hear the aria. Higgins appeared to be mesmerized by the music.
‘All right, you can go,’ he said.
Jack was puzzled at the strange look on Higgins’ face, but then he, too, heard it. Or did he hear it? Was it in his and Mel’s heads and were they were imparting some of it to Higgins in a bleeding transmission? It was worthy of a scene from Doctor Who.
With infinite slowness, Mel got up from her desk and walked out the door. Jack followed.
They stepped into the corridor where Mel bade Jack stop and look.
‘At what?’ he asked.
‘Look again.’
Vines were growing on the drab corridor walls. He and Mel rushed down it, the plaster turning to stone before their eyes.
The next thing they knew, they were in that garden in the roofless ruin behind Mel and Juliet’s house. But this time, all the decay and overgrowth had been tenderly cleared away, revealing a pond with a scalloped stone fountain.
Jack found himself wearing a suit and Mel was in the first dress he’d seen her in, a lovely, white flowing thing.
Daniel looked at the old fifties fridge with its antique yellow finish, chrome art deco flourishes, and sighed. He wanted to keep it and fix it up, but he knew it was just as easy to take it to the tip. The rest of the rubbish pile that Jean found so offensive he could dispose of more easily on their property. He backed his Holden up to the fridge, opened the boot and reached in for ropes, wondering how he would lift it in on his own.
Brute strength?
He consulted his watch. Jack should be back by now, with Simon’s game scheduled for the afternoon.
Daniel crouched down, lifting underneath the fridge, when he heard an unfamiliar sound intermingling with his groaning.
Lowering the fridge back to the ground he turned to spy Juliet’s property at the top of the hill. Jean always complained about how isolated they were, nestled in the valley, but occasionally the wind could do that, pick up a noise, a half-song of birds, the bleating of a sheep, and sweep it down to them. But not for a long time had they heard human sounds.
The fridge forgotten, he walked slowly to the stile bridging the two properties, the beautiful transcendent singing falling like a light rain after a decades-long summer.
Mel stood up from the water’s edge where she had been kneeling and stepped before Jack. Each stood perfectly still, looking into the other’s eyes across the distance of an arm’s length.
‘You’ve found me,’ said Mel happily.
For some unaccountable reason, Jack felt himself on the precipice of tears.
‘I…’ he choked.
Smiling, Mel held a finger to his lips.
‘Shhh.’
As Daniel stepped over the stile, he could better make out Juliet’s exquisite tones dancing upon a song he’d only heard on the radio, but knew to be from the opera The Mikado. Juliet’s clear voice conjured a world of experience, of magic created and sustained, if only for a night’s entertainment, a night’s relief from the shabbiness of everyday life. The beauty, the tenderness of that voice! A grief staked his heart. What things he hadn’t seen! What places, what lives, art, music, theatre. What worlds upon worlds.
His one venture overseas had been to a well of senseless depravity and horror. Yet there was a duality to life, a beauty that made the darkness all the more unnecessary… heartbreaking.
What beauty he had never sought, never tripped wonderingly in search of, tried to catch in hide and seek.
The sun, whose rays are all ablaze
With ever-living glory…
The light, the glory, the effulgence. There were artists who transmuted the broiling fears and hopes of the soul, and what had he done?
‘I mean to rule the earth as he the sky…’ she sang, ‘…the sun and I…’
He paused, the waving grass a false audience. Were those words for him? He punched his knee. How vain of him, how falsely inflated to think he mattered. What had he to offer to one who’d gone out in the world, one who ‘lights up well’? That he, Daniel, should not have mattered to her, that she left him, he could only echo the aria: ‘I, for one, don’t blame her!’
He paused again, closeted amid the ghost gums. And yet… the mutual insomnia, the light in her house that he had seen from his, that light he’d seen at one, two, three in the morning as he wrestled himself from Jean’s ever more fearful grip, and made his way to the dining room window…
We’re very wide awake,
The moon and I.
Could she have been, from her window, reaching out her heart and mind to him as tremulously, fatefully?
Rubbish! He was a failure. Nothing. How could he matter to someone who ‘means to rule the earth…’ and did. Had. In her exceptional career.
But did she rule ‘as he the sky’?
She knows her worth, but no, not I.
No. He wasn’t the sun to her moon. Daniel accepted what he had known for a long time but never before dared articulate, for fear the already fragile tissue of his life would rip to confetti. He counted for nothing, and never had.
Mel gestured for Jack to follow. They pushed through a hedge to see a stream. A black swan was swimming along the inky, giddying swirls with its chicks. Mel watched them and laughed. Then, in a flash, she turned to Jack, a furious expression on her brow he’d never before seen. A revulsion, a distaste for… no, not life… but everything that is its antithesis.
‘The world could be so good,’ she hissed.
Jack scoped from Mel to the swans in their perfect serenity. He knew there were two meanings to good. Good as in great and good as in…
Mel parted another hedge. On the other side was Juliet in her lounge room, singing that beautiful song. But it was in the real world and Jack wanted to stay in the magical garden forever.
Mel pushed her way through the hedge.
‘No, Mel, not yet!’
She walked up to her mum, while he held back. Suddenly, as if gripped in pain, Juliet fell to the floor, clutching her head.
Mel’s cry shattered the air. ‘Mum! Are you all right?’
Jack rushed forward, leaving their briefly forged realm of dream.
‘Yes. Yes, I’m okay, dear.’
With difficulty, Jack and Mel helped her to her feet. Juliet extricated herself from their caring hands and brightened up. Daniel appeared shyly at the open French windows. He watched for a few seconds before Jack noticed him.
‘Dad!’
‘Sorry, heard your singing… Beautiful. Except perhaps that last note.’
Mel blushed.
Daniel caught Jack’s eye. ‘Um, Jack, just wanted to remind you we need to be getting to Simon’s game.’ He immediately felt morose with the words he’d just uttered, their sheer, offensive banality. He might as well have mentioned the pleasantness of the cool breeze.
He and Juliet shared a long look, Daniel feeling like a fuddy duddy. The children examined their respective parents questioningly, then Jack tugged on Daniel’s hand.
‘Come on, Dad.’
Mel followed. ‘I’m going too, Mum.’
‘Mel! If it’s all right with Dan?’
Huffily, Mel drew her arms across her chest. Daniel smiled consent, and Mel and Jack raced off ahead of him, down the hill. Daniel shrugged at Juliet as though to say he had no choice but to follow. He started to back away through the open door but stopped. If nothing else, he would at least stand above the pettiness, the jealousies, of his fellow townsfolk, and acknowledge Juliet’s success. For he was proud of her: genuinely and without rancour.
He looked her straight in the eye. ‘I owe you congratulations, Juliet.’
She examined him quizzically.
‘You never gave up.’
In that one expression Juliet could intuit a whole world of disappointment in Daniel, an understanding his incipient talents had never been acknowledged, tutored and brought to prominence as they had been in her.
What might she have done for him, if she’d only thought to try? Always accounted a success, what was she in this respect? Where might she be now, if it weren’t for her mother’s chance meeting with her worldly father, a man from Europe she’d met in town, and his considerable contacts on the continent? If Juliet had stayed, she might have him, Daniel, but would that embrace have been enough to cancel out the other disappointment, a thwarted career? For every win, a loss. For each choice made, a million denied.
Life is lonely.
Daniel turned and followed after Jack and Mel, who were already quite a way down the hill.
Juliet held her hand to her breast. ‘You never gave up,’ he had said to her. No. She had given up in one aspect of her life. She’d given up on him! And when she’d finally come back to the place and person she could never forget, it was too late. Far too late.
For she was dead.
Or soon would be.
Simon was playing a home game against the visiting football team, from nearby Hahndorf, the spectators on the sideline cheering them on, Jean the loudest. Whenever Jean nudged him, Daniel yelled too, but far less vociferously. Simon kicked a goal. Jean and half the sideline roared. Jack looked at his brother lapping up the acclaim and then at his approving mother. Mel nudged him and smiled. Jack couldn’t help but smile back. She took his hand.
‘Come.’
The two snuck off, only Daniel noticing. But he said nothing. These days of youthful optimism would be over for them before long. He would not begrudge them a single hour, nay, minute.
That evening, when Jack and Mel returned to Juliet’s, Mel confirmed Jack’s very chivalrous appearance at her detention that morning, and related how he’d refused to leave.
Feeling her heart aflutter, Juliet told Mel to chaperone Jack to the stile and to come back quickly, since they had a guest arriving soon. When they left, she feverishly rang Jack’s house, hoping Daniel would answer.
‘Juliet?’ he asked.
‘Daniel, I’ve sent Jack down. But… I really rang to say… I mean, I want to congratulate you on your great achievement.’
Daniel grabbed the doorjamb with violence. What had he to be congratulated on? What torture, this? And from Juliet?
Juliet turned to look out the window, to see rollicking with her girl the just as incomparable…
‘Jack,’ she whispered.
Daniel quickly rung off, worried he would blubber like a child.
Walking up the hill to meet Jack, Daniel tracked the progress of a purple Valiant travelling along the ridge to Juliet’s place. He knew from the gossips whose car it was. Well, what was he thinking anyway? From what Jack had told him, Rush was well-travelled, sophisticated, erudite…
A small, fragile edifice of potential happiness he’d built within his soul on Juliet’s return, caved in on itself with the sight of Rush alighting at Juliet’s porch, and her greeting him with a fervent embrace. The dust of hope whirled in one final eddy before settling upon him as the shadow that hitherto had lengthened across his whole life. Only this time it was made darker, for the brief contrast of light her presence and Mel’s had brought.
He looked up at the marvellously blue sky; as if this part of the world had just been dunked under delicious water, all the colours running to a turquoise, muddy brown.
He loved the land but was ambivalent about the people. Yet there was no one to blame but himself for staying put.
He knew he would ball if anyone showed him any sympathy. He hoped to hell people went on not noticing him. At least Jack and Mel were happy, and he wanted to do anything in his means to keep them in that state.
Toco Productions 