Free Charades by Janette Turner Hospital Page B

was — so the bone man told me, says Charade — the great-great-great-grandmother of my mum Bea, the Slut of the Tamborine Rainforest.

9
    Nicholas and Verity
    The lace curtains stir, ballooning softly and subsiding, as though the windows are breathing, and Charade asks drowsily: “Who’s responsible?”
    â€œRadiators,” Koenig says. “Convection currents.”
    â€œNo, I meant: Who chose lace curtains for your bedroom?”
    â€œOh.” Rachel, in a sense, he supposes. He still chooses things with her ghostly presence in mind. “Ah … Joanna, I guess. My housekeeper.”
    Charade sighs. “Was this her side? Her pillow?”
    He assumes she is not referring to his housekeeper.
    Here I am, Charade thinks, lying within the hollow of another woman’s life just as my mum floated in the cavity left by Verity Ashkenazy.
    â€œVerity stalks me,” she says. “She and Nicholas Truman, my father, are always there in the middle distance. Before I was born they walked through the rainforest like mirages, dropping crumbs of delirium, and the Tamborine people licked them up and had visions. That’s what Michael Donovan told me. Well, not in so many words, but that was the sense of it, and Michael got it from his brother Brian — the one who was paralysed from the waist down after he smashed up his father’s truck. And Brian had got it on another occasion, before the accident, from their father when they were on the town in Brisbane and his dad was drunk as a bandicoot and talking. But Michael Donovan’s dad had an axe to grind, so
who knows?”
    In the loops of silence between sentences, Koenig hears the whisper of Rachel’s pen writing and writing her letters. His daughter’s voice reproaches him. His son chants with the Moonies.
    â€œKeep talking,” he urges Charade. “What did your father
look like?”
    â€œIn the mornings he was golden, and glowed like Apollo. At least, that’s what I like to think. Since I’ve never seen him, I’m free to invent and I picture him hovering over Verity like a sort of god of the forest. He kept her safe. He gave her mangoes to suck, and she dreamed of him every night. My mother Bea and my aunt Kay dreamed of him too. He was one of those men …
    â€œHe was like Krishna, you know? On the banks of the Jumna five hundred milkmaids pined for Krishna and each believed she was his one and only love. Each could prove in voluptuous detail that the night of the last full moon had been spent in his arms — even though they all knew that Radha could tie him up in the coils of her sari.
    â€œMy father, Nicholas Truman, had powers like that.”
    â€œYou’re looney,” Koenig says. “You’re wonderfully crazy.”
    â€œVery likely,” Charade admits.
    But Koenig wonders: do I put words into her mouth? She has such a flickering look, and he does have ulterior motives.
    â€œNo, no,” she says. “If anything, it’s the other way round.”
    â€œWhat?” Koenig pivots on one elbow, looking down at her. He is certain, quite certain, that he hasn’t spoken aloud. Hasn’t even finished a thought.
    â€œFirst I dream up my man, then I track him down, then he has to hear me through. I was born under the sign of the Darting Tongue when the moon was licking at the Southern Cross. So my mother says. If I stop talking, I’ll vanish like camphor.”
    â€œAh,” he says lightly, “and then where should I look?”
    â€œLooking,” she sighs. “I’m an expert in looking, but not in finding. I’ve never found my father.”
    â€œWho resembled Apollo,” he says dryly.
    â€œYes. Though even he was struck dumb by Verity, and I can be specific about her. Well, loosely specific. There’s a painting.”
    â€œA painting?”
    â€œMichael Donovan’s dad did it.