The Soldier and His Sweetheart
From the front steps he can hear the clank of dishes through the kitchen window. The dog trots to him and rolls over. Its ears fall open like a bat's, eyes rolling with rascal glee, legs sprawled open. Obediently the man scratches the dog's belly with the edge of his boot. The endless Brisbane sunset is warm golden syrup in the air. The sun catches the dust on his glasses and blinds him. The dog chuffs and whines, then scampers up the steps, claws clatter and slip on the wood.
"Do you really have to go?" She says. Her skirt fills the doorway, then up, up to her tiny, aproned waist. In his peripheral vision, beyond the black frames, he sees the pale turn of her neck.
"If I was on the stoop back home right now, I would be waist deep in snow. Need a snorkel just to get to the sidewalk." He leans forward over his knees, and juts his chin.
"You've been to war already, you almost died. Do they really expect you to go back?"
"Meg." He says.
She softens, and sits beside him. "You really charmed my parents."
He takes her hand. "They're good people." A pause. "They really don't have a problem with-me?"
She colours. "Lou, what are you saying? Did you think they would be-"
"Meg-" He says.
"That they would be some kind of anti-Semitic-"
"Meg! No. I'm just-" He pauses, "I know I would be pretty damned racist against anyone who tried to take my daughter to the other side of the world."
She smiles coquettishly. "Well, they're better people than you." She sniffs.
"'People', what 'people' would that be?" He is unable to hide the tease.
"Oh, you know what I mean." She glares, "Dad used to bring home all kinds of people, orphans and tramps-I'm not making this any better, am I?"
He breaks into a broad belly-laugh. "You're darn cute when you're digging yourself into a hole. I'm sorry, I can't help myself."
"Cad." She flicks him with her apron. "You think they'll like me?"
"Don't they already? They raised you."
She draws her frustration into her sinuses, then sighs with a huff. "Your parents."
His smile tightens.
"I'm afraid that was your cue, Spencer Tracey. Your line is 'Of course, darling, how could anyone help loving you?' And action!"
"Of course, darling, how could anyone help loving you?"
"Very convincing."
He chuckles, "They will, they will. My mother tends to get in a sweat about things, that's all. Dad will talk her out of it, and they'll be fine, they'll adore you."
She pats his arm. "Much better. I almost believed you that time."
Night rolls in long navy swathes. The humid air is quickly filled with warring scents of trees and flowers; musky banksias, mangroves gnawing at the soil, and the toppling frangipani blooms. Against the blue sky, rakish bats lurch and screech and squabble, drunk on late-autumnal fruits. The soldier and his sweetheart stand and stretch.
"I should go back inside, and be charming." He says.
She shakes her head, "They've gone to bed."
He scoffs, "It's seven thirty!"
"You're leaving tomorrow."
"Oh..." He nods, "Class act."
She leads him through the hall to the lounge. The shelves of the bookcase have bowed with their fruit; several Bibles, collected Freud, a Koran, Oscar Wilde, anthologies of John Keats and Omar Khayam, and a new edition of Ulysses.
The soldier thumbs a spine. "Science and Health?"
She shrugs, "Roy, my brother Roy, got scarlet fever when he was three. No one could help him, the doctor said he had less than a week left. Mum was desperate, she took him on a bus across town to see a woman, a faith healer. And Roy was fine. The healer was a Christian Scientists, so now, so are we."
"Do you really think she healed him?"
"I wasn't born yet." She says, and ponders for a minute. "Mum is pretty stoic, it takes a lot to shake her. Praying helps her, so I'm grateful for that."
"Then you don't believe."
"I do. When I was a child it was as real to me as my own hands. It gets harder. You start wondering what kind of God would allow these things to happen in the first place. But I have faith. I think."
There is an upright piano, well polished with play and the same beeswax her mother used on the coffee table. They stand at either side, watching, judging the silence. She kneels on the piano stool. She cups her right hand, her second and third finger trace his jaw, lowering his chin.
His ears go red, "God, I have to shave."
"I like it," she says. "Tomorrow."
"Yeah?"
"Yes." She kisses him.
He is lost in it for a minute or so, then sighs gently.
"What is that for?" she says.
"I get so caught up in every little thing. But when you-kiss me. Everything is just gone. There is nothing there. And it's perfect. It's whole. What could I possibly be scared of, when you kiss me like that?" He shrugs, "I'm not making any sense."
"It's okay. I know what you mean."
"Makes one of us, then." He tries to smile wryly.
She shakes her head. "You didn't have to do that. Joke. You're safe with me."
"There was a boy sitting on your wall this afternoon, just in shorts. He had red stings up his legs from the sand in the wind. He told me he had a Nazi boot with a Nazi foot inside that had washed up on the beach."
Her shoulders go limp, and she drops to sit on the bench. "Okay. I give up."
"It was all mangled, one of the toes was missing, but it grew back. He said it moved."
She smiles, "It was a starfish." She slides to the left and looks up at him. "Where did you just go then? You were so still. What startled you?"
"To think, I always thought the starfish would take our side."
She sinks her fingers into the keys slow enough that no note sounds. "When I was fourteen, something was wrong with Roy. He was in bed more often than not. If it wasn't fever, it was chills. He barely ate, and he couldn't keep down what he did. They diagnosed him with leukaemia, and said to keep him comfortable. Mum sent me to boarding school because she didn't want my piano playing to disturb him, at least, that's what she told me." She keeps testing the keys. Silent Debussy in one hand, Franck in the other. "I was there for two years, and while I was gone, my brother died."
He sits beside her, helpless.
"My teacher said I was the most promising pianist to come out of Australia in fifty years. I won a full scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London. What could I have played that was worth two years of knowing him, of taking care of him as he always took care of me? How can my music mean anything, after that?"
He takes her waist. His hand is large and smooth and warm.
"I didn't feel anything when he died. I didn't even cry, I was just numb. It wasn't real. It was so far away." She turns to him. "What's wrong with me?"
He pulls her tight against him and kisses from her temples down to her cheeks until they are blotched and salty with hot tears.
"What happened, with the scholarship?" He says.
She grimaces in disbelief. "We're at war, Lou."
"Oh," he bows his head. "Of course."
"It's not so bad at the War Office. What's the difference between a typewriter and a piano, or shorthand and musical notation, really?"
"Come with me." He pulls her up.
"Come where?" She takes her arm back
He grins. "Your parents' room is on the first floor, right?"
"Right. Where are we going?"
"It's a surprise."
He leads her outside. "Stay here." He jumps over the fence, rummages around, then lifts over a long extending ladder. He pushes himself back over, and leans the ladder against her two storey house.
"You're insane." She says.
"I used to do it all the time in New York. I basically lived on fire escapes."
"You're insane!" She says.
"Shh! You'll wake your parents." He starts climbing the ladder.
She hisses, "I'm not coming."
He takes hold of the roof and pulls his legs up. He looks down at her, crouching. "Okay, I'll jump down-"
"No! No. Fine. Just... hold the ladder still for me." She tests her weight on each rung before standing on it but lets him lift her up to the roof, once she is in reach.
She lies with her head on his chest. Beneath rationed soap and starch, he smells like dough warming in the sun. The moon is a new peeled egg. He is humming something he heard at Cloudland the other night and running his palm over her waist. She toys with his hand.
“When I was a kid, there was a physicist who used to work in a park near my block. He liked pigeons. I used to ask him stupid childish questions, you know, and he would give me perfect, scientific responses, I still don't understand most of them. I asked him if he believed in God, and he said, he believed in entropy. He believed that there was limited chaos in the universe, that the most stable forms were the most chaotic, that nothing can truly be created or destroyed.” He is still.
She watches him, wary.
“If I die-”
“I'm not letting you finish that sentence.”
“Please.” His eyes are tired and wet.
She sighs.
“Don't let my mother bury me. I don't want to be preserved in some impenetrable box forever, I want to be part of a bird or a fish, or a tree. I like trees.”
She presses her hands into his forearms. “I can't lose you.”
“I know.” He says.
They spend the night on the roof, falling through sleeping and waking. He stirs against her as if trying to pull her into his dream. In the morning, they will hear the kettle and her mother panicking over empty beds.
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