A reasonable proportion of the women abide in the love of their
own sex. This is true also of a proportion of the men. Some, too, are
quite solitary.
Now Lee’s kids by his first association are grown, Irene and Lee
have started again with a baby of their own. Isn’t it nice to know you
can always start again?
Dianne and Damien are infertile, one of them by the knife.
Dianne exercises so hard that her menses have gone hay-wire.
Elaine and Bruce have a good num ber of pussycats.
Gillian eats no milk products. They make her sick. So her figure
remains ship-shape without effort.
Jenny can’t stomach the tiniest trace of farinaceous foodstuffs. It
causes a kind of mimetic global depression, not conducive to advising big business in the flow structure of their computer databases.
Ki-in-jara is pure, a virgin. Rirette, sated to the edge of emptiness
and death, almost finds satisfaction in him.
She looks at his face, at the dark, pocked planes, and his eyes are
light entire. She touches his strong hand with the exquisite m anicured fingers which hours earlier had hurled the bottle in useless passion at the void of useless living. She takes his hand and leads
him to the small oak table in the dining room, and rings a bell, and
the caterer fetches in their repast.
As they eat, his silence is as rich as his conversation.
The fowl they eat (swan, from the ponds), and the Barossa wine
in the crystal, and the joint with the dark coffee, are things shared.
Before Ki-in-jara came to her out in the desert, Rirette never
imagined herself other than a singleton, an isolate. She has been always Society, never her deep true self. In Ki-in-jara she has found a spiritual world opening beyond herself, a reverberation speaking to
her from the mythic centre of a continent as dry and empty, until
now, as her heart.
‘You hold open the door,’ she tells him, ‘waiting for me to pass
through it.’
She has never known love before.
The Interior
231
Nigel writes poems of love and hate, epithalamiums to the Hogan.
His daughter dances to the night, changing her hair. Many women
know Nigel.
‘Love,’ Ki-in-jara says, ‘is an echo, a pool where ancestors look up
into us. Love is a place we may rest. It is a return from one to the
other.’
‘Where have you learned these things?’ she asks him, touching
his scarred cheek.
‘One-sided love is a hurt,’ he tells her. ‘Love is a giving, and a
receiving. W hatj you ask for is comfort,’ he says, and she has never
heard this harsh truth from him before; it tears her. ‘W hat you need
is reassurance, and love.’ He is a solid warmth.
Ki-in-jara is not self-sufficient.
He needs to give.
She sees that he offers his soul and she is too terrified to enter.
Love is too big a thing, almost as myth, as the ancient place the
Hogan bruises with its monstrous new weight.
All her life her givings have been inessential, untrue, selfish:
witticisms, criticisms.
H is shadow moves over her heart.
And she is weeping, freed, in his terrible desert arms, all his
virgin desert mystery holding her, salt-wet tears like the great rains
which have begun to crash into the secret red heart of the continent, tears lifted from some distant ocean and set down pure, cleansing and burning her eyes.
Ki-in-jara holds her, and strokes her pale beautiful hair, and sees
that what the ancestors have told him is so, that she has been at the
verge of self-destruction, that he must call her to their waiting
places if she is to be spared the ruin which has been done to her.
Only native birds and flora are permitted here, in Restitution.
Pets, though, are allowed inside the Hogan. Another plague of
rabbits would be quite a set-back.
‘Rirette,’ Ki-in-jara whispers, ‘this is not all.’
Wonderingly, she gazes up.
‘Not enough,’ he says. ‘Love comes from the spirit, from the
Rainbow, from the sacred places, not from this world of machinery
232
Damien Broderick
and images and babbling toys.’
She is not surprised to hear him speak of his ancient faiths, for
his people were nothing if not religious, but she is surprised to find
comfort in his words.
She draws back gently from his arms.
‘Take me, Ki-in-jara,’ she says, ‘if it is permitted, to your sacred
sites. I have . . . things
