He planned to break off twigs to mark his way. He noted the position of the sun. In his pockets were handfuls of sultanas for the dog, who would be ravenous, not having eaten since Monday evening. These precautions struck Tom as sensible, therefore as presages of success.
His watch showed ten minutes to eight.
One difficulty was that the ground wasn’t level. Trying to walk in a straight line, Tom found himself scrambling in and out of gullies. Tree ferns crowded in one. A steeper trench was knitted with fallen logs, the rotting wood treacherous underfoot.
When he flung out a hand to save himself, his fi ngers encountered a growth as springy and slick as liver.
His sense of direction was good, but obliged to proceed in arcs, he began to fear doubling back on his steps. He had been snapping off twigs and thin branches in passing but the undergrowth had a way of pushing back to obscure these scars. Along with this elastic quality, it was tall-often as high as Tom-so that in every direction his eye met only the thrust of leaves.
The hillocky terrain was playing tricks with his marker trees. The shorter of the two had disappeared. The other was further to his left than he would have liked, and looked different, less skeletal than it had first appeared. A foreshortening brought about, Tom reasoned, by the angle of his view.
Despite these difficulties, he drew closer to the tall eucalpyt. He had, after all, made progress.
Cheered, he ate a few sultanas. The dog would understand.
By the time Tom reached the tree, the light dropping through the leaves had dulled. He sniffed the air: humus, and the aromatic scent he noticed the day before; and behind these, the faint, distinctive odour of rain.
The scrub was thinner here, his progress easy. But Tom had the impression that something was not right. It came to him that someone he wouldn’t want to see would be waiting beyond the trees. He stood still, ears straining.
Then, as he advanced, and the track faded into a clearing, he saw: the tree was wrong. It was the stumpy one, split at the top like a broken tooth; the jagged crown, smoothed by the direction of his approach, was plainly visible now. He looked over his shoulder and saw the tall tree far behind him, pointed in warning.
For two hours he had crashed about a modest wedge of scrub and trees, an area of perhaps three acres.
Rain began to fall.
Tom stepped over a log and felt his sneaker sink through the ooze of leaves covering a shallow depression. His ankle turned, a little.
He patted one pocket, then another. A picture came into his mind of the kitchen table: radio, laptop, spare batteries, his papers and books; the mobile phone he had taken from his wet jeans the previous evening. It would almost certainly be out of range here. Nevertheless, he had been negligent.
Overnight, these had become his familiars: fear; rage at his carelessness.
Back at the house, he added hot water to pumpkin soup made from a packet he found in a cupboard. Its savour was chemical; trust Nelly to buy a generic brand. His feet were icy, there was a dull ache in his ankle. He swallowed a second cup.
At first, Tom rationed his visits to the Preserve: several days had to elapse before he would let himself return. Very soon he saw that Yelena did not register his presence except in the abstract, as the homage her beauty extracted. Her friends would gather at the Preserve of an evening before going on to clubs or pubs. There were those among them whose faces hungered for her. Tom saw the girl’s consciousness of her power. She was amiable with him, including him in the casual sweep of her attention but making it clear he held no particular interest in her eyes. Although beautiful, Yelena was kind.
All the same, as autumn gave way to winter, Tom was a regular presence at the Preserve. The ease with which he had slipped into familiarity with Nelly surprised him. He was not given to swift intimacies of the mind, but it was almost as if he had known Nelly of old.
Her laugh was huge, disgraceful. It broke loose over small things. Yet when he was away from Nelly, Tom discovered that he was unable to picture her amused. Try as he might, he could call up only a frozen version of her face. One effect of this was that the mobility of her features delighted him afresh every time he saw her. Another was the brief, disconcerting sense of a familiar face overlaid with strangeness.
It was only when his loneliness lifted that Tom realised how acute it had been. The Preserve offered companionship and conversation. It offered Brendon, who designed websites by day and was usually to be found in the Preserve at night. His presence was signalled by music: fugues, cantatas, concertos turned up loud. He was secretive, allowing no one into his studio. At intervals he emerged to prepare tiny, lethal cups of coffee brewed in a blue enamelled pan. Brendon brought handfuls of flowers into the Preserve, and mandarins and walnuts, and coloured leaves. When his imagination stalled he would build these, along with the apples Nelly loved, into Arcimbaldo-like fantasies, a cork serving for an eye, a paper napkin pleated into a ruffl e.
He was a spidery man. Tom would watch, entranced, the deft movements of his long arms. He noticed that Brendon was compelled to touch beautiful things: the curve of a jug, the buttery leather of Yelena’s new bag. Once, leaning over the girl, he lifted a strand of her hair: ‘Gold enough to eat.’
Nelly lived on awful food, squares of soft white bread, instant noodles, tinned soup. (Brendon: ‘I had this bag of peas in the pod once. Nelly goes, What are they? I say Peas, and she goes, Very funny, Brendon, I’ve eaten peas, they’re round.’)
It was one of the things that endeared her to Tom. Early in life, he had encountered too many people who did not have enough to eat. It remained with him as the only thing that mattered about food: who had it and who did not. In a city where friends fell out over the merits of rival olive oils or the correct way to prepare a confit of duck, Nelly’s lack of interest in what she ate was bracing.
Yet in odd pockets of diet she was faddish, returning laden with Gravensteins and Royal Galas from the Saturday street market. Once a week she dosed herself, rather ostentatiously, with an infusion of senna pods and ginger. ‘Get plenty of fresh air and keep your bowels open. Ancient Chinese wisdom.’
It grated on Tom. ‘You’re, like, what? Third, fourth generation? Why do you pretend you’re Chinese?’
‘You think I should pretend I’m Australion?’
‘What?’
‘Australion. You know: like the ones who think they own the place. The Australions won’t let me, for one thing. Want to know how many weeks I can go without getting asked where I’m from?’
Nelly’s mother was a Scot. Among her ancestors she counted a Pole and an Englishman. The cast of her adulterated features was only vaguely Asiatic. She exploited it to the hilt, exaggerating the slant of her eyes with kohl, powdering her face into an expressionless mask. Stilettos and a slit skirt, and she might have stepped from a Shanghai den. A sashed tunic over wide trousers impersonated a woman warrior. She wore her hair cut blunt across her forehead, and drew attention to what she called her ‘thick Chinese calves’.
She was not for the taxonomy-minded. Sometimes a rosary strung with mother-of-pearl served her as a necklace, while a red glass bindi glittered on her brow. Her palms might be intricately patterned with henna, or her chin painted with geometric tattoos. She was smoke and mirrors; a category error. Yelena, noting the attentiveness with which Tom was examining an old photograph of Nelly with dreadlocks, remarked, ‘She is not some kind of sign for you to study, you know.’
There was wit in Nelly’s self-fashioning. Sometimes she fastened her hair with chopsticks. Her fondness for a particularly unflattering set of garments had Tom baffled for weeks. Then suddenly he understood. Baggy trousers that ended above socked ankles, a red quilted parka, a man’s felt hat jammed on her head: it was the anti-chinoiserie favoured by the ageless Chinese females who can be observed presiding over bok choy and cabbages in vegetable markets.