Free Cosmo Cosmolino by Helen Garner Page B

seem familiar?’
    The sunglasses bothered her. Would it be cheating to ask him to take them off? What were the rules? The trouble was that nothing about him so far rang a bell, nothing at all. Again she felt that her heart was fixed too high in her chest. This was not a game. It was much more crucial: a test, like the exams we face in dreamsand have forgotten to prepare for. She let out a nervous laugh.
    â€˜Don’t you recognise me?’ he said. ‘Don’t I remind you of someone?’
    Perplexed, Maxine rubbed the crystals of her necklace. She wished she had bought the pocket stone after all, the four-dollar one that unified every aspect of life .A false move now might ruin everything.
    He was young. He was tall. In the power of his teasing his thin shoulders seemed to widen. His hands were invisible, clasped under his neat cardigan. How fresh he looked, almost beautiful, smiling there on the checkered path and waiting for her to take the plunge! A grand confusion of possibilities blossomed in her head. Was he a son, from another incarnation? Was he her father, come back on second thoughts to bless her? Was he her imaginary brother, her male self, soul’s husband, cosmic twin? Was he an angelic being of the kind that comes in paintings offering a single lily, the flower whose contemplation furnishes all that is required? Or was he simply the bearer of the key to a shed?
    â€˜I’m sure this is terribly important,’ she said, ‘but just for the moment I don’t seem to know quite what to say.’
    He looked down and laughed: a pleasant sound: a voice with a crack in it, like music. Oh! she trusted him.
    â€˜Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’ll come to you. I hope this won’t seem forward—would there be anything here to eat?’
    â€˜Of course. Come in!’
    â€˜Thank you. I’ve been on the road a while.’
    Maxine imagined a peppering of galaxies, a tremendous trajectory along the star lanes. She saw a stony track among palm trees, a low horizon fading under a sky of pure green; and at night a woollen cloak wrapped round, the deep chill of a body sleeping on sand. She glanced at his thongs. They were pristine, utterly unmarked by travel. But he was already past her and through the front door, stepping carefully over her cooling bucket, and forging on into the body of the house.
    Now if a house can be bruised, this one was. Its height and depth were still imposing, but its windows, propped open with lumps of wood, had to gasp for breath, and plastic bags nested in the branches of the trees outside them. The garden behind was derelict, wild with shrubbery and composed of moribund clods. The bicycle in its shed had grey pancakes for tyres. Indoors, the planet lamps bowed their heads in corners and over the table, and dusty runners lay discouraged in the hallways, drained of the energy to slither, as rugs should, along the floors. Had its enfilade of hollow rooms ever been counted, ever been tamed and put to use? The heart of the house was broken. It oughtto have been blown up and scraped off the surface of the earth.
    But houses as well as their owners must soldier on: and what would this pair of lost souls, already off on the wrong footing with one another, charging down the hall towards the kitchen where perhaps a heel of dry bread awaited them, a scrap of cheap Camembert lying shamefully on its face—what would they care about the building’s history? All they saw was roof, walls, floor. This was what they needed. Why ask questions? Why search for more?
    â€˜This house,’ said the young man in the darkest part of the hallway, ‘is rather large.’
    â€˜I know,’ said Maxine with a blithe laugh, skirting round him where he had paused to stare up at the framed pictures askew on the walls of the stairwell. ‘I haven’t even seen all the rooms yet, let alone cleaned them.’
    He gave her a strange look, but she