Mt Fuji - Short Story

Literary Review, Fall, 2001 by Brenda Walker

Sally says that your life is like a book. It has a beginning and an end. When I tell Robert this he says You want to keep the blank pages to a minimum. He s looking at me, and I have to look away.

Sally talks about utmost respect, sound mortuary practices and the bodies that are taken up over the cliffs, the bodies that are not recognisable as human remains. She's training to be a mortician.

We roll the thinnest cigarettes. Her exam paper is on the table between us. There's a question about the little bones at either side of the larynx, the bones that break in strangulation. I smoke lightly, just to the back of the throat, for the taste. The cigarettes lie under the bump on my second finger that a lot of writing has caused. It's hard to get them even, when they're this thin. We're poor. Sally has nine dollar shoes and thin cigarettes and her chicken lasts three days. I'm poorer, but I've rented a house with a view. When I first came to the mountains I thought I'd write a book. Instead I drive between the mountains and Robert's house in the city, and the fuel light shows empty every time I turn into his street, and his new Chinese wife says Stay. I bet you're low on petrol. Stay.

A postcard of Mt Fuji arrives in the mail. The mountain from this angle is a deep blue, almost the same blue as the sky. If it were not for the snow it would be easy to mistake the blue slopes of the mountains for a slight darkening of the sky.

The card is from Momo, who is very sick. On the weekends that I am not in the city Robert drives down to be with her family.

I keep Mt Fuji on the windowsill above the sink. I can see our own mountains, behind it. Our mountains are more like great ridges that have broken and fallen or held firm. Late in the day the cliffs turn orange, then violet, then soft grey. I would write to Momo about this, if I knew how to reach her, amongst all the machinery in her hospital ward.

On the back of her postcard Momo says I'm going to be alright. I wish I could visit you sometime.

Sally has a fox terrier with ears like little glossy leaves. She lives in a room at the back of an empty house. Her blinds are pulled down, through the day. No lights. A lit oven, fifteen minutes at a time, for warmth. And weak tea, thin cigarettes. Rex and Sally watch and listen, through the day. Or Sally looks down and embroiders so perfectly that the threads seem to lapse from one colour into another.

My house is cold and bright, smelling of lavender oil from the two dollar shop. There are no curtains. The trees outside are black, the mist is white. At night the smoke alarms go off, one after the other, in a clear procession down the hall. Photographs scud across my room. I'm composed, looking out on this, calling the fire brigade. They check the alarms. They say it's an old house. There's something, some dead presence, in the house. They see this kind of thing in the mountains. I walk through the house in the daylight and speak to it like a child or a difficult friend and say, You look so beautiful. Why can't you settle down? I tell myself it's better to be afraid of what's inside, like me, than what's outside, like Sally. For one thing, outside is bigger.

When I go out on the harbour in Robert's boat I wait on deck for the shortest possible time. Then I go down through the galley and rest on the big bed that smells of old varnish and salty feet.

Robert takes me to a good restaurant and orders dish after dish. I am waiting for the time when we will be out walking on Darlinghurst Road, his jacket across my shoulders, talking about his work, his paintings and his wives. I've known him through all his marriages. I've known him before the prosperity, when we all lay in the long grass under Mt Warning thinking about surf-breaks and cattle-ticks. At night people fucked sweetly on the floor by the dining table.

Robert and I are standing in front of a glass case in a sex shop on Oxford Street. I like the transparent plastic vagina best. It's full of blue liquid, anti-freeze, like the square blue anti-inflammatory packs that pharmacies sell. I want to ask Robert what it would feel like to to slip through that lubricated coolness. He's looking at other things. The people who design all the sex shop stock must meet around a table, with a scatter of blue or pink or brown vaginas. Someone checks off all the sales.

When I came to the mountains I went to an auction to buy a fridge. There were plenty to choose from; plenty of household things thrown out in clean-ups or trucked away from houses broken up by debt or other losses. Sally had a mirror-backed china cabinet; a Chinese cabinet, she said, and laughed, that she bought at the auctions. The only new things in her house were the dresses she embroidered for her nieces. One of the fridges at the auction was filthy, with melted lettuce and splashes of spaghetti sauce inside the door. It was still stacked with anti-pain packs from some pharmacy.

I am afraid of what is inside. I know it isn't orderly like a Japanese lunchbox. I think of Momo all the time. I glance down at Mt Fuji when I'm washing up and I feel my grief in my chest. They call grief passionate sadness, on the self-help shelves.