Closer to Stone Read online

  Simon Cleary was born in Toowoomba in 1968, and attended university in Brisbane. He has lived in Sydney and Melbourne and travelled widely in Europe, Africa and North America. He lives in Brisbane. The Comfort of Figs was published by UQP in 2008. Closer to Stone is his second novel.

  To Sue Cleary and in memory of John Cleary

  And of course

  Alisa

  ‘You almost expect,

  when you touch this body,

  to find it warm.’

  AUGUSTE RODIN

  What went wrong, Sergeant Logan?

  I don’t exactly know, sir.

  You were together six weeks. You knew him well?

  We knew each other from before that, sir. We’ve known each other since we joined.

  You’re friends?

  Yes, sir. He’s a fine soldier, sir.

  In your opinion, Sergeant Logan, what happened?

  There are so many possibilities, sir.

  Go on.

  I don’t know . . . all sorts of things.

  What are some examples, Sergeant?

  He could have got separated from his lift, sir . . . he could have got lost, or been killed, or had an accident, a mine . . . it could easily have been a mine, sir . . . or taken prisoner . . .

  Do you really think so? Seriously, Sergeant Logan. What else? Give me something else, something plausible.

  Anything’s possible, sir. It’s the desert after all.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  I was petrified when the plane finally landed at Casablanca’s Mohammed V airport. It was four o’clock in the afternoon on the second of February, 1993. I had some photos of Jack, a few names, a crude plan and more responsibility than I could bear. At twenty I’d barely ventured beyond the quarry-town where I’d been born. Now I was in Africa. The size of the thought! Casablanca, a city of God knows how many million, and there was not a soul I knew or knew me.

  Somehow I got myself by train from the airport to the central railway station. I only have snatches of memory of that darkening city – images that collide and fragment as I try to recover them. I recall a sign beneath the carriage window, a lit cigarette trapped in a red circle: Ne pas fumer. My six months of grade eight French was so slight. And the Arabic scrawled below those words like scribbly-gum markings was unintelligible. I didn’t know if it was even language back then, though it wouldn’t have mattered – half the carriage was smoking anyway.

  Then the chaos as I stepped out onto the tiled platform at the Gare du Port, and the madness of searching the crowd for Jack’s face. Knowing it was impossible he’d be there, but unable to staunch the hope. Standing there helpless, till I surrendered to one of the hundred taxi drivers crowding round me, pulling at my bag. A dizzying journey through the streets followed, the headlights not only the wrong colour, but the current of them coming from all the wrong angles. The entire world spun round wrongways. Flashes of light picked out curiosities, all unsettling: children selling chewing gum in the traffic, men holding hands as they walked, all the bent and faceless shuffling-veiled women, the palm trees and the rubbish swept into the gutters, a rampant Peugeot lion blinking in neon above a building. I wrote down a street name before it flashed past – Rue Laalouj – a futile attempt to get my bearings.

  At some point the taxi passed through what seemed like a giant keyhole in a high wall, and a band of shadow fell across us like a guillotine blade. On the other side was the medina. The cab slowed and there were voices and hands and shoulders of men brushing against the vehicle in the tight alleys, and all the while my bag was in the boot. The noise which burst through the window when the driver wound it down to ask for directions was no sound I’d heard before, not yet something I knew to call music. Finally we stopped at the Hôtel de France where the driver handed me over to the innkeeper, some arrangement between them, a wad of dirham changing hands beneath a portrait of their king on the wall.

  When the driver left, the innkeeper lifted a guestbook from beneath the reception desk and opened it on the counter. Muttering some terse instruction, he swivelled it round and pushed a pen towards me. I followed the pattern of entries already there – name, address, nationality – and obediently wrote. My passport hung around my neck in the money pouch my stepmother, Em, had bought me before I left. I opened the little navy blue booklet with its gold coat of arms, and its kangaroo and its emu facing each other, and copied down the number. After completing the final column on the page – profession – I slid the register back across the counter to the innkeeper. He checked without interest what I’d written until he reached that last entry. He leant forward, peered closely at the word before tapping it with his finger and looking up at me.

  ‘Cela,’ he said. ‘Qu’est-ce que cela signifie?’

  But how could one explain the work of a sculptor?

  *

  When at last I got to my room on the third floor I locked the door, dropped my duffel bag beside the bed, and hurried to open the shutters. I closed my eyes and breathed, all the air my lungs could hold. I had no chisel I could take in my hands to feel its comforting weight, no stone to calm me. When I looked out across the city I saw a bright blur: strings of bulbs, neon street signs, the interiors of nearby buildings lit up, red warning lights on the tip of each of the cranes down at the port, flickerings in the darkness near the horizon which might have been tankers at sea. I heard my heart beating in my ears and exhaled. A swallow stirred from its roost nearby and darted through the night air, its dark shape lifting with each wing beat, rising through the scales of some invisible night-music, before abruptly turning and swinging back the way it had come, a moth now pincered in its beak.

  I lay on the bed but didn’t sleep. What I’d left behind was as foreboding as what might be ahead: the trajectory of my life had been blown so totally off course. I’d had to turn my back on my first commission, the bearded dragon I was cutting from a great block of pink sandstone in the backyard of our home at The Springs. His collar of rust, his head and neck, the ridgeline of his back already broken free, his shoulders muscling their way out of the stone. Just three nights earlier I’d been standing before him, working by makeshift floodlight, my mallet and point-chisel flying, scattering sandstone chips on the ground – so many shards of cream and pink and brown – desperate to finish him before I had to go. But it was no good. Despite those late nights I’d still had to abandon him on a platform of temporary railway sleepers at the back of the yard, sweating under a sheet of dark tarpaulin, while my father sent me to Africa to find my brother.

  *

  The screeching started near midnight. The streets below the hotel teemed with cats, the narrow alley outside my room funnelling their hissing up to the window and through the shutters to echo around the walls. An incessant howling, wild with hunger or mating instinct or territory marked. I hung a blanket from the top shutter-slats to muffle the sound, returned to bed, shivered and checked my wristwatch every fifteen minutes.

  I lay exhausted until dawn was surely not too far off. Then a new sound, entirely foreign, broke open the night. It was a wail, neither strong nor delicate. Even whether it was near or far I couldn’t tell, the sound distorted by whatever distance it had to travel, an inconstancy on the gusting ocean winds. My first thought was of a rabid dog losing itself in fever. But there was no agitation in this whining. It was more like the sound of dingoes beyond a campfire, flat and controlled. Then, from another compass point, a second wailing began, as if in answer to the first, and I understood they were not dogs, but men calling into the night. Two men, droning away in the dark. And then a third voice, and a fourth, perhaps more. Some ritual was t
aking place out there. I imagined Aborigines chanting through the darkness around the tentative encampments of The Springs’ first settlers, unsettling them. The stories our father told Jack and me when we were kids.

  I crept from my bed, lifted the hanging blanket, and peered sideways through the slats at the faded stars and all that lay beyond. Now the chanting was like warrior calling warrior out there in the night, warning the city of an intruder, planning their assault. Because on that first night I was just a boy, a country child who knew nothing of Muslim calls to prayer. Wide-eyed, I listened to the wailing city, my cheek pressed against the cold plaster of the wall. The moon, visible near the roof-line at the end of the street, was many days from full, a mere sliver of crescent. In time the last echoes of wailing stopped, there was silence, and I crawled back to bed, curled tight, and waited.

  Finally dawn broke. Everything was so still, all so quiet, the cats and demons vanished, the world fresh again. I pulled the blanket down from the window, opened the shutters, and looked out at the city’s scalp, the strange geometry of its roofscape. The layering of building upon building: square, whitewashed, paint-peeled, each set close beside the other, cascading down to the port. Antennae rose above the roofs, waves of satellite dishes all facing the same direction, as if having turned as one. There was the shimmering Atlantic I’d smelt the night before, the tips of the harbour cranes, egg-yolk yellow, a ragged army of them turned against the prevailing sea breezes.

  A tower out there among the squat white buildings caught my eye, each of its four sides green-tiled. There was a brilliance in it, some calmness of form in the midst of that intimidating sprawl. A golden orb and crescent were mounted on its tip and rose towards the sky, the crescent cupped just so, as if inviting the entirety of the sky to rest in its arc.

  TWO

  A taxi dropped me at the gare routière before dawn on my third day, to catch the long-distance bus to Western Sahara.

  I’d spent the previous day holed up in my hotel room, venturing out only to stock up on food and to buy my ticket. Because Casablanca’s medina wasn’t the exotic place Jack had described on his first weekend’s leave there. It wasn’t an extravaganza of colour and fragrance and sound, as he’d written in that confident hand of his on the postcard he sent home of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. Instead, the carved fretwork he’d described, the minarets and the ancient fountains and the narrow alleys – they all seemed so threatening. The donkeys pulling carts of vegetables, the old men and the henna-palmed old women, the swirl of Coca-Cola signs in Arabic, the plastic teapots, the strange-shaped watermelons, and the hands of dates hanging dark against whitewashed walls . . . I know there are people who say it’s just another Mediterranean city. That Europeans have taken their annual holidays there for years and that students at the Université Hassan II were probably wearing Levis just like me. I know that now. But back then the city was utterly foreign. I could have drowned in it.

  The gare routière was no better than the medina, probably worse in the darkness, but I had no choice. I joined the current of people outside the gates of the walled compound, my duffel bag slung over my shoulder, moving with them towards the entrance, and the sound of the bus engines starting inside. Bodies pressed against mine, bodies and bags and boxes and sacks of hessian. In front of me a shrouded figure balanced a crate on her head. I watched it rise and fall with each step, its rhythm hypnotic. As I passed through the gate, the woman and I were momentarily pushed against each other by the crowd and I saw the crate was a cage, and that inside it were three hens, their beaks glinting in the light of a kerosene lantern hanging from a nearby pole. One of the birds squawked, its frightened eye fixed on me until the tide of people pushed us apart once again.

  Inside the compound voices were calling. Men began pushing close, tugging at me, shouting through white-specked moustaches. Over the din men yelled the names of towns. Fez, Marrakech and Rabat I’d heard of, the other names mere syllables slurred together, the entire country named in the dimness.

  ‘Non, non, non,’ I said to the first, shaking my head.

  ‘Where you go? Where?’ he demanded.

  I ignored him, but others came. Their intensity grew, the way they pushed close, two or three of them together, blocking my way, insisting I answer.

  Eventually I took the ticket from my pocket and lifted it into the air. This must have looked foolish, but it worked because when the men saw it they melted away. I passed through the crowd like that, the ticket raised before me, Moses and the sea, kids pointing the way.

  The bus was idling when I reached it, though the driver’s seat was empty. A young man with a short beard was throwing luggage to another, even younger, who stood on the roof of the bus, legs astride, like he was riding some beast. He had the poise of an athlete, catching the suitcases as they were thrown to him. I showed the bearded man my ticket. He grunted and reached for my bag. For a moment I hesitated, worried about parting from it, some security in having it close, slung over my shoulder or resting in my lap. But he insisted and I let him throw it with the rest, a fluid movement of arms and shoulders and chest and head. As my bag was packed away in the tray on the roof of the bus I remembered a trip we’d made to the beach one summer when Mum was still alive, how our father had loaded the suitcases on the roof-rack of our Kingswood the same way. The skill it took, the satisfaction it gave him.

  Some women were seated inside, sleeping already, veiled heads pressed against the windows, blankets close around their shoulders. A rough semicircle of men squatted on the tarmac near the front of the bus, impassive faces lit by cigarettes. I stood nearby and watched a mother and her children climb the stairs, watched the luggage being thrown. I hugged my smaller daypack to my chest, to keep warm as much as anything else. A young man with a woollen hat pulled tight around his ears offered me a smoke. I shook my head.

  The first wave of the day’s buses began to reverse slowly from their bays, headlights still off but horns blaring. Exhaust fumes came off the rear of the buses in clouds. A man walked in front of each bus like a goatherd, yelling at the crowd, banging the palm of his hand loudly on the side of the vehicle, pushing people out of the way, leading his charge through the compound and into the street, the opaque dawn.

  Then it was our turn. The change in the pitch of the engine, the driver in his seat, the youth on the roof pulling a tarpaulin over the mound of suitcases and boxes and cases and crates. The one who’d thrown my bag yelled into my face, his breath foul, and motioned his head to the door of the bus. The men tossed their cigarettes aside and we filed on. I took the last window seat, near the back. An old man stood in the aisle beside me. He wore a large brown coat which fell long around his legs, hid his wrists in its wide-looping sleeves and covered his head in a deep hood. A strange skin so many of the old men here wore. Then he sat down next to me, his face set back in his hood and its shadows. I pulled my own jacket tight.

  The bus nudged its way through the gate of the gare routière. I became aware of a clicking, close to me and not quite rhythmic. Prayer beads were moving through the old man’s thick fingers, his wrists still. I turned away and pressed my cheek against the glass. The young man who’d stood on the roof of the bus was now jogging beside it, waving at people he knew, calling out their names, before he leapt on as it picked up speed – a readiness for action that reminded me of Jack.

  But Jack wasn’t just athletic. Though he’d won every race there was to win, captained every football side he ever played in, and crammed the sideboard with trophies Em will have kept somewhere, there was more. The way he strode along the cliff-tops of the family quarry after school, his gait so confident, as often as not out in front of our father, ready to make a glorious success of the business when it was time for him to take over. Ultimately though, it was his composure more than his confidence. That was the thing that made you believe there was nothing he couldn’t do: he was out ahead of everyone else a
nd could see things coming a mile before anyone else did. The sense you got that time somehow paused for him, that he shaped the world more than it shaped him.

  You can cling to people like that, hope they’ll look after you. Sometimes they do.

  *

  It was a Saturday not long after the fire that took Mum, and our father hadn’t yet worked out what to do with us. We were young – I was seven, Jack nine – and there was still a quarry to run. Our father left me with someone in town that day while he took Jack out to the quarry with him. There were orders that needed filling, stone to cut, and he’d spent so much time away in the weeks after Mum’s death he must have been worried about the business. He would have been exhausted too. That probably accounts for it, because it usually took two men to operate a channelling machine, one to turn the wheel, the other to clean away the mud.

  Jack was playing among the blocks when it happened, jumping across the gaps between them – when he heard our father yell. It would traumatise most boys to hear their father scream like that, to see his arm hanging, all that blood. But not Jack. Not then, and not later either, as far as anyone could tell. He was a young boy who’d lost his mother a month before, but was calm as could be. He led our father by the hand – the one still there – up to the office, and got him into a chair before he fainted. Jack rang triple zero and did what the operator told him. Took off his own small t-shirt and held it to the wound. His nine-year-old’s hand staunching the blood like that Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke, the channeller’s engine still thrumming away in the distance, Jack waiting calmly for the ambulance to arrive.

  Even as a kid, Jack had stood between us and ruin – our father’s one consolation in all the broken years that followed.

  *

  Outside my window the city began to unravel. We’d left streets lined with colonial buildings and their wrought-iron balconies, the intersections and traffic lights, the restaurants and the businesses with their sheen of modernity. Soon carpet emporiums were replaced by petrol stations and mechanics’ garages. Then even that order petered out, as if it was all pretence and the effort of keeping it up was too great.