Copyright © Carmel Bird
2001.
All rights reserved.
There's an old story about a man who was condemned to death for a crime he had committed. He begged the king for a year's reprieve during which time he said he would teach the king's horse to talk. He explained to his friends that at least he would have another year of life, and that in a year the king might die, or the man might die, or the horse might die. Or the horse might talk.
Well I used to think like that. Mum would say, Skye, you can't go on hoping for the impossible. And I'd say I reckoned Jason would come good in the end. Once we're married, I'd say, you'll see. He'll be able to get right away from his family's influence. Mum said pigs might fly.
We got engaged. We were all set to come here to Queensland for a holiday. I am here alone in the hotel, in the room we had booked for both of us. Mum was dead set against me coming here by myself after all that happened, but I was determined. Mum knew a girl that actually died from grief, killed herself because her fiance broke it off. I know one or two that tried. At least take Lisa or someone with you if you're going to Brisbane, Mum said. But no, I'm going to get over it by myself if it kills me. There I go. I didn't mean that to come out the way it did. I'm not the suicidal type, I'm really not.
This is the exact room we were going to have, me and Jay. I've got a photo of him in a gold frame on the cabinet beside the bed. I have the ring solitaire - and the photo and my memories, and I'm going to get over it. I lie on the bed and stare around me. It's a pretty funny room, really.
Called the Tropical.
The rest of the hotel has been modernised - luxurious but bland. But they decided to keep the Tropical the way it was twenty years ago. You come up in the lift to the second top floor - the pool's on the top, and it seems to me that the weight of the water causes cracks in the walls up here. The Tropical might disappear one night in a great big tidal wave coming down from above. You get to the end of the corridor and you come to a little trellis with a gate, and over the gate in letters made from bamboo it says 'Tropical'. You go through the gate and come to the door of the room. The walls are yellow and the carpet's green. One window that looks out onto a thing that must be the lift or the air-conditioning. That's the view. Then the curtains are yellow and orange with patterns of brown bamboo. The bedspread's the same. Two sketches of monkeys, framed, on the wall, and a clock beside one of them.
The clock's a sort of thick plate on which is carved a tropical scene, a beach at sunset, with hibiscus flowers around the edge and a bunch of bananas too. The hands are thin, like long red needles, and I lie on the bed and I watch the second hand as it moves - it goes in funny little jumps, and it doesn't exactly tick, it sort of clacks. Clack-rest-hiss. Clack-rest-hiss. But it's not exactly regular.
When I got here (they were expecting me and Jay) there was a huge basket of fruit on the glass table underneath the mirror. 'Welcome to the Tropical Room - Skye and Jason' it said on a white card pushed into a bunch of grapes. I haven't touched the fruit, and now they have begun to rot. They smell, that sickly sour smell you get with rotting fruit, and tiny insects, almost invisible, hover over them. There's a woman comes to clean the room, but she must have instructions not to touch the fruit.
Welcome to the Tropical Room - Skye and Jason.
I lied. I told them he was coming later. He won't be coming. He's dead. I stayed for the funeral and then I came here.
A week later than we had booked, but the room was still available.
The day before we were due to come, the day after our engagement party, Jason and his brother Scott went bushwalking. This was nothing unusual, except you wouldn't expect them to do it just the day before we went away. The day after the party. But anyhow, they were always going off
somewhere, just the two of them, or else a group of people from the uni. I went with them a couple of times, but it was too cold and wet for my liking. The scenery was beautiful, I will say that. You can't beat the Tasmanian highlands for scenery. Let's go to Queensland for a holiday, I said to Jay, and he laughed and said OK. He was very easy-going.
Not like his brother. Scott was more the nervy type. And I reckon he was gay. I liked him, don't get me wrong, but I always got the feeling he wished I wasn't around. I first got this feeling one afternoon last summer. And it got to be more than a feeling - I knew and he knew I knew.
We were sitting on the back veranda at their place - they lived with their mum and dad at Sandy Bay - and you could see the yachts on the water and there were seagulls standing on the steps leading down to the beach. I see all this so vividly, like it was etched into my memory. And Scott went down the steps and he scooped up with his hands some seeds from a flower. They were little black seeds mixed up with a cloud of silvery gossamer. Beautiful. He brought them up to where me and Jay were sitting on the veranda, and I thought for a minute he was going to give them to me, but he stood over Jay and he let the seeds fall down on his brother's head in a soft shower, a drift. And he said with a crooked smile on his lips: There you are, these are dreams, Jason.
That was all. It sounds like a silly little thing now that I say it, but at the time I knew that Scott was - well, claiming Jason, was marking him, was telling me I couldn't have him. Not ever, not if he had anything to do with it.
I kind of understood, but I refused to believe it, to face it. I loved Jay with all my heart. We were going to have a great life, kids. He was going to be a geologist, and I was hoping to have my own beauty salons.
I have never said this before, and I'm not ever going to say
it again, but Scott was in love with Jason, really, truly in love,
and he did everything he could to put me off. He was studying
literature, and reading books by Patrick White, and the only thing
he ever said to me about any of it was, 'Listen to this - he says
women are one of the messier kinds of fruit.' Actually I just
walked away when he said that. He thought it was true and funny.
And he told me some jokes once that proved he thought men having
sex with women was really disgusting. That women were disgusting
anyhow.
(One of the things he said was
Q: How do you find the girls hiding in the garden?
A: Follow the snail trails.)
Scott hated me. But Jason was only half gay, if that's possible, and I believe he wanted to get away from Scott. It's incest, after all. If their father knew any of this he would have taken one or both of them up the bush and shot them. Maybe that sounds incredible, but you don't know their father. I can't understand how Phyllis, that's their mother, can bear to live with him. She's really very sweet. And of course she's completely shocked and devastated by what happened. They were the only children, and now they're gone, both of them, just like that. She says she doesn't understand why two men who were such good bushwalkers could fall to their deaths from a safe platform on a clear day. They simply went walking and never returned to the hut. It was freezing, but clear. They died in a place called Olympus, a mountain. Well, they looked like Greek gods, anyway.
I've never been to a funeral before, and actually, I can hardly remember theirs. But I've never, ever felt so sad, so terribly, terribly sad. Lisa said she expected me to throw the ring into the grave. I didn't. People rang up from the TV and tried to make me talk about things, but I was truly speechless with grief and shock. Jason's father went on TV - I simply don't know how he could do that. They sent cameras to the funeral it was in the cathedral, and mum says it was very dignified and beautiful, but I wouldn't know. I wouldn't look at the television afterwards, but people have told me they saw me - stricken, my grandmother said I looked stricken.
Well I was.
But I'm determined to get over it. I lie on the bed in the Tropical room, with the noisy air-conditioning that doesn't seem to make any difference, and I drink rum and coke and fill the room with blue and yellow smoke from my cigarettes. I just lie here in my underwear, staring at the TV, staring at the cracks in the walls, wondering about the swimming pool overhead, staring at the clock - clack-rest-hiss - and time passes. I eat packets of peanuts, and I can smell the basket of rotting fruit. I am crying most of the time.
When I come to my senses in a day or two, I'm going to forget Jason forever, and I'm going to go down to the lobby, and I'll sit there in one of the great big armchairs and I'll let somebody pick me up. It nearly happened the night I arrived, but then I wasn't ready for it. This bloke came up to me when I was just booking in, and he said he wanted to take me to a Greek island. I thought I must be dreaming, and I looked straight through him. But in a day or two, I'll get up and have a bath and throw out the fruit and put on my black dress and stilettos - Jason loved them in fact - and I'll go down to the lobby and just see what happens. Mum keeps ringing up to see if 'm all right. I'm all right.
A funny thing happened last night on the TV. They interviewed a woman in America who talks to horses. She said they often talk back to her. Sometimes they talk in Dutch. She said she doesn't understand Dutch. I'm not sure whether to believe her or not. You just never know, especially with television.
END
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