Turn Left at Venus Read online

  Ada understands that her whole life has taken place in simultaneous moments.

  Electric kookaburra again. ‘Kay Dee-ee! … No change, but I know they can still hear … What? Fucking Corinna, did I tell you she was a bitch, no offence to bitches. Who made her boss of the situation? It’s so not what they want. They were carrying the proper paper so we can know their wishes … Norway! What time is it there? … Yeah I’ve got all the texts, so I’ve got that somewhere … No, I am, I am, I’ll read it now. ’

  A time-defying pause and the sound of a fresh conversation.

  ‘Oh my fuck god,’ Jay speaking into the phone. ‘Cause there’s this head-nurse type who can get them moved really soon. Yeah, met them, Corinna, old school … Oh because,’ Jay’s voice takes on a vicious sarcasm, ‘they can “do everything right there, and the patient has got the top insurance” and all that …

  ‘Kay Dee is saying go slow on letting everyone know – there might already be a rumour, someone knew they’re in Sydney, Doc Diagonal. Isn’t that the one who writes the academic stuff? Probably that was Kay Dee who told them and who’s sorry now … That’s what she told me too. I’m totally going to read it right now when you let me get off the phone! … Tomorrow, if there’s no change. There will not be a change, no. There is always a chance but I always can tell, I just always can … I know it is, we’re all on it, be ready … You too.’

  Ada understands that there will be no change. She will not move she will not speak. She understands a big decision has to be made and they are taking the steps to make it. She listens to Jay, she speaks with Noemi, she tells her everything she ever told her. This is a life. This is.

  Jay moves closer and is now speaking to Ada. ‘I know you heard that.’

  11

  THAT RIDGE IN THE MOUNTAINS

  On that ridge in the mountains their senses stretched in new dimensions. The black air was dotted with sparkling fireflies and sparkled with crystal chimes, music that as Debussy said of the gamelan he first heard in Paris in the 1890s at that World Fair is music of percussive charm, its melodies developing according to fantasy arabesques, so Kevin told them, Kevin who would later write of the effect of this music, and write his new music affected by what they were hearing now. They had never been so alive. Ada felt that they all felt that. Music that spoke of their present and ancient selves as the notes flashed like the fireflies in the soft warm air, air sliding like warm oil on their skins, hastening in leisurely ecstasies. The kerosene lamps extinguished, their odour for a while was even stronger then disappeared as the world emerged in the colours and scents of night, champa blossoms, and magnolia and jasmine, and you smelled cloves and coconut. Verdancy filled the air lit now only by the fireflies or the waxing gibbous moon arcing over their arrival.

  Kevin had summoned the little orchestra for their welcome. The players were meeting often lately; the full moon festival was intriguingly anticipated. You always knew the phase of the moon here, from now on Ada would always know.

  There, then, Ada had no idea of the meanwhile and the consequent and the subsequent. Time became disorderly.

  The soundtrack of their lives was that music telling them that their lives did not follow a known orderly procession, they did not follow straight lines and familiar patterns.

  The music clanged and tinkled and chimed; the separate notes and chords of the metal and bamboo gongs fell into diaphanous patterns, while its pauses called for an awareness of the richness of natural sounds: frogs, birds, insects, ducks.

  That night of their arrival Ada first listened to the gamelan play, and one day she had often listened to it.

  She sat nearby as they rehearsed, at another pavilion in the compound.

  The players of the orchestra were seated in the shade of their pavilion; the brightness of the light outside made a specially intense contrast with the cool shade they sat in.

  The drummers led the gamelan, the shimmering rhythms slowing or scampering.

  The ducks waddled past reliably every fresh morning at first light and came back as the light softened to evening; the ducks went to preside in the padi by day, fertilising the soil and keeping the growing rice free from destructive insects: in this world everything was connected and essential to everything else. The procession of ducks each early morning as the pale green light entered their sleeping pavilion, and the procession of ducks returning from the padi in the soft violet dusk.

  Already Ada knew she was doomed to give her life to lines of text; no, she did not know that she knew, it was Kevin who said, ‘You will write about this’, as if he knew about her writing. Yet Ada never wrote about it. Not exactly. Not in the way he seemed to mean. And yet.

  At that time, among the gongs and fireflies and clove-scented breezes, of course the journey they had recently made from Sydney must have been a clear fresh memory. An image always remained of the entrance area of the hotel in Denpasar, those dark green shadows of traveller palms and papaya palms, and Ada is certain this is a real memory, the moments in which they arrived and she observed this, taking it in, this was her own moment and not taken from similar moments that would later be seen in paintings.

  The moment she and Leyla simultaneously took their gaze from the giant twin traveller palms, gentle sentries either side of the hotel entrance, to look at each other united in the amazement and satisfaction of having arrived, of having done everything they had done to arrive here.

  Ada said, ‘I would never have come if not for you, thank you.’

  Leyla said, ‘I know.’

  After a day or some days, their bags were placed upon a cart, an old car left the town and wound its way along a road through rice fields, past villages where solemn lovely children, such a little one entrusted with holding a baby, gazed upon them from the roadside without apparent surprise, they passed a waterfall, they went into the hills. They pulled to the side of the road and a procession came by, the heat beat down on their heads, the people went by in a dazzle of costumery and percussion, refulgent white and glittery gold, batik cloth wound into long tight skirts, shiny trays of flowers and fruits carried on heads, gongs and cymbals sounding. Every now and then a face came into clear focus.

  Though dormant for years these images would return, Ada would always notice how vivid are the first impressions of a new place, how you will remember most the first few things you noticed, how there was a necessary innocence in many first travels.

  They had arrived. Kevin smiled at Leyla and Ada, frankly displaying his own changes, knowing exactly what they noticed.

  Here he was brown-skinned, relaxed, intense, proud, in his element. He was engrossed in building his house, trying to find the man in charge of the thatch, trying to supervise the laying down of floors, the installation of bamboo walls. There would have to be a ceremony before he could move in. Nothing could happen without a blessing. He was supervising yet learning.

  No sooner had Kevin shown them the pavilion they would sleep in – a raised platform with a thatch roof, carved ceiling beams, a perfectly adequate shelter in a compound of pavilions – two carloads of travellers arrived, large white people, and for the first time it struck Ada, how they, how we, how her kind appear as lumbering and barbarous among the natural slender graceful nature of the people upon whose land they had thrust themselves, without, come to think of it, invitation, but then aren’t we all invited to all of the world simply by having been made, placed, upon it?

  Musicians, making a kind of pilgrimage, young musicians, music students, come from Los Angeles and Toronto to stay with Kevin; they had passed around something he’d written, some new music he had composed, some account of his attempt to make notations for the music he had heard here, music that excitingly disturbed all his notions of music, music that would make the great modern composers of the West want to put their head in a bucket, there was no meaning here to dissonance. And this group, six of them, had found a way to get here. Kevin found them a house to stay in, boy musicians mostly.

  And
one girl, who dressed like a boy and stayed with the boys and that was Una, Ada always forgets her last name, it was O’Something then, before it changed: Una who went on to compose music in Hollywood and won an award and did the music for the film and died too young, and Ada now does not know if she ever heard any more about any of the others, there is no room in her thoughts for this. Well, one of the others, yes, who she had not particularly noticed but who Leyla particularly had.

  Una made music with the boys, fine, so she should do what she did, dress as they did, stay where they stayed, learn and practise along with them. Their hosts, the people of the village, never remarked upon it to any of the visitors, who could not know what they said among themselves. Kevin said he knew, but he couldn’t know for sure, there might have been a woman player in the gamelan.

  Kevin had said in Sydney, ‘Come to Bali, you’ll love it.’ He’d lived there before and had to leave because of the war. It had taken him longer than he planned to return but he was on his way there now, via Sydney, and expected to be there for as long ahead as he could see.

  They met Kevin at the club, he came with one of Les Messieurs, and he played the piano, and they had all stayed till closing, and they all liked each other, and at the end of the night he played some tunes for them and he had said, you should come, and Leyla said, send us an invitation from there and we will, and he did, he wrote to them, something came in the post, that was exciting. He said, Come.

  They found out the cost of getting there – how did they find that out? Ada will never remember. Was there a travel agent? They saved a little from their jobs, not much, then they spent it all. They liked to eat at the Continental restaurant and to buy frocks from Charles, which even with his discount did not come cheap.

  Leyla said this once, ‘It’s only money.’ Ada later learned it’s a saying. Leyla might have heard it somewhere or she might have invented it; people do come up with the same sayings and puns and aphorisms; as the current must-say saying spreads, you can’t find a single first time it was uttered. Even Shakespeare might have heard those fresh phrases in a bar or on the street: vanished into thin air; get thee to a nunnery. Did Shakespeare ever say ‘it’s only money’? He might have.

  They were invited to the Races at Randwick, and the men placed bets for them, mostly according to their own, the men’s, advice, but sometimes Leyla and Ada would insist on a horse they liked the name of or because they liked the jockey’s name or colours, and at the end of that day they had won a small fortune, enough, that is, to take the trip.

  It was the only time Ada went to a racetrack. Sometimes things just do work out that way. They thought things always would. It wasn’t even hard to get a passport.

  Money had been a source of worry in their suburban childhood homes – money was needed for now and even more for the future; you could suddenly lose it all, part of the reason Ada and Leyla both had left school when they could to earn their own living, but it wasn’t only that: to earn your living was to earn the way you lived, living in Kings Cross, free women in the new world of the end of the war.

  It’s only money, if they had it they would spend it, if they needed it more would come, if it hadn’t come yet it would come tomorrow and there never would be in all her own long life nor in Leyla’s the anxiety about money that blighted other lives they witnessed.

  Did Ada already know what an anthropologist was? And here was Susan Steel making her notes and asking her questions through a translator: how was that woman related to that other woman, how did a boy court a girl, what must a child never do? Susan transcribed her translator’s information and eventually presented her findings to the world; her investigation had begun based on her curiosity about the trance states here she had heard of while studying trance states among some Pacific Ocean tribes, states that in her own culture would be stigmatised as dissociative personality disorder but here were states conjured up by ritual and regarded as divine inspiration or something of the kind, but really can you really translate another’s culture into your own familiar terms?

  Susan Steel thought you must be able to.

  Susan Steel explained why anthropology was necessary. There were so many different cultures, she said, that could be studied. All cultures had some things in common. All cultures had their own ways. Human nature was what they all had in common. The rest were the distinctive differences that anthropology was all about.

  A woman came to measure Ada and Leyla for a piece of clothing. Kevin explained that they would wear it at the full moon festival.

  Susan refused to be measured.

  ‘He is well meaning, I suppose,’ said Susan in a tone of doubt about Kevin, ‘but you should wear the clothes of your own culture.’

  ‘You two. The girls. The Australian girls.’ They were ‘you two’, they were the friends who had met on the boat as children.

  Still, they spent more and more time apart, Leyla waiting for and going to her dance lessons, held in one of the bamboo and thatch pavilions in the compound where the dance teacher lived, and Leyla did not come right back, staying to take food with the people there, and, Ada eventually realised, spending more time with one of the musicians from LA.

  ‘I was here in a former life,’ Leyla informed Ada. They were eating together that time, and Ada remembers that because they didn’t always eat together now. Their idea of eating had changed; here there were many little dishes, there was spiciness, the necessity of rice, the holy centrality of rice, the eating off banana-leaf plates, and Kevin showed them how to use their fingers correctly, a skill Ada would be glad to have acquired in the future; ‘I learned in Bali,’ she would be saying in India.

  ‘Back there,’ said Leyla, meaning not only Sydney, ‘they think there’s such a thing as the right fork for eating cake.’

  Ada and Leyla laughed together over this insight and for the pleasure of their mutual understanding.

  They repeated it to some of the newcomers.

  This moment of Ada and Leyla as a pair, a kind of couple, with their shared joke.

  But this must have started happening less, who would know, they were in a quite different environment now with so much enchanting novelty inflating the capacity of their attention.

  There was Ada thinking she was noticing so much and there was so much she had not noticed.

  ‘I was a princess,’ Leyla said, ‘in a former life here.’

  They must have been at Kevin’s for long enough that they had picked up some notion of former lives, or did they already know of it? People then did not assume knowledge of the idea of former lives or commonly speculate about them.

  Leyla telling Ada that they, the people of these hills, thought of her as one of them returned. Probably a queen, Leyla said. Did she say it in front of Kevin? Probably not. Certainly not. But in front of the other visitors. Some of them. Ada believed her and did not believe her.

  She did not know what parts she did believe.

  Leyla would make things up anytime she felt like it. She decided Ada was just her tag-along. ‘I came here to study dance,’ Leyla said to the others; ‘she wanted to come along.’

  The way Ada remembers it, the idea of Leyla taking dance classes there first came up after the first night they saw those dancers, could it really have been their first night on Kevin’s hill?

  Leyla’s dance class happened when the dance teacher summoned her, and it could last many hours. There was not a set time, that wasn’t how things worked here, you could not ask for lessons at set times, Leyla explained. There was a measure of time invisible to outsiders, you see, and Leyla naturally was in tune with it. Leyla was, Ada was not.

  Leyla was acting as if what she did when Ada wasn’t around was so privileged it put her in a kind of superior position; she was learning by doing, she was being taught things she could not reveal.

  She was a participant, Leyla declared with a new vocabulary, and Ada was a mere observer.

  Ada sat on a straw mat in the shade of a thatch roof in an open-side
d pavilion in the compound near Kevin’s house, and watched women prepare trays made of large banana leaves, fashioning small containers from smaller leaves to place upon them, fastening them with tiny sticks. Filling the small containers with rice, adding frangipani flowers to the tray, pieces of peculiar fruit, incense sticks; these are offerings for ‘gods’ if that is really the word for the divinity they want so much to appease or, really, to please. Black-toothed old women spat a stream of red juice like thin blood: that was buai, betel. Little girls sat with the women, learning the techniques of the offerings. Were they thrilled to be part of the labour, resentful, no, none of those things, this was a different world, what was it to be a child here? Happy gods, who needed these tributes given to them twice daily and more intricate oblations for ceremonies: more coconuts and bananas, more prepared foods.

  ‘The gods are kind enough,’ Kevin pointed out, ‘to allow the people to consume the fruit and sweets consecrated to them. As if they were returned with added value.’ Kevin could be kind of sarcastic.

  Ada was glad not to be asked to join them in the making, whether they let her only watch because a visitor should not work, or should offer first, or because she would defile what they did. No one said anything to her but suddenly she was given a glass of tea upon a tray, light, fragrant tea.

  Ada thought, What if. What if there were a possibility. What if there were a place. What if you invented the place. What if it were a place you would not find on a map of the world we know. What if we could read like children do, accepting the world of the story like the Magic Faraway Tree with its various worlds found at its summit.

  Susan Steel was taking notes about women’s work. In all societies women and men have separate work roles, Susan said to Ada. Susan liked to be the knowledgeable professor, instructing the naive young ones. Susan Steel said that in every society ever men and women had separate and different roles.