Charades by Janette Turner Hospital

she is standing there shuddering, rigid, like five hundred volts has zapped her. She turns around towards Bea and the Pommy and gives this little cry that gets stuck in her throat and then she starts to crumple like a tablecloth falling off’ve a table. The bloke catches her, kinda swallows her up in his arms, kinda combs her hair with his Pommy-pale fingers, and Bea stands there with her hands on her hips and looks daggers at us and pitches in with some brimstone heated up specially for us.
    â€œBut what I see, Brian, is the way she is watching the bloke as he strokes the Ashcan woman. That’s when I know. I know she wants him bad and I know he’s been fingering her. I reckon that is the night young Charade got made in a hurry, which explains that wild little she-tiger what young Michael can’t keep his eyes off. All I know is, I pissed off and went shearing for a year right after that bloody party, and when I come back there’s Bea with another nipper.
    â€œThey musta gone at it like dogs, I reckon, Bea and that Pom, the fancy shithead, which is the real reason, if you want my opinion, for why Bea is so flaming mad. It’s because of the way he’s touching that other sheila, Bea’s mad as a hornet, except that she turns it on us. ‘You bloody dickheads,’ she spits at us. ‘You bloody uncivilised drongos! I asked them to come, and you better bloody make them welcome.’
    â€œThen the Nicholas bloke looks up at us through the Ashcan woman’s hair. ‘My apologies, chaps,’ he says, in his sick-making Pommy voice. ‘I’m sure no harm was intended. If I explain that … well, later, perhaps.’
    â€œAnd he does ’is explaining later, deep in the bar, men only and everyone blotto. ‘When she was six,’ he says, ‘her parents were dragged off to the camps, she never saw them again. It does things, I’m sure you understand. Allowances have to be made.’
    â€œ ‘Struth!’ Billy Stolley says to me. ‘I don’t know about no camps, but that bloke is a pain in the arse.’
    â€œAnd I drink to that then, and I drink to that now.
    â€œBut I tell ya, Brian, I still have dreams about that woman. About what I might have done if I ever got close enough to touch her. I dunno about those camps, damned if I know what they got to do with anything. But I’m telling ya, son, that woman was strange. Like I say, some sheilas born asking to be bruised.
    â€œAnd Jacky Dobson was right. She got me, her net come down, and I’m a goner.”

10
    Photographs
    Sometimes, Charade says, I think of the droplets of stopped time in photographs, oceans and oceans of it, in all the albums and wallets and drawers and attics of the world. Lies, all lies.
    Because the camera falsifies everything, doesn’t Koenig agree? There’s the picking and choosing, the arbitrary framing, the whole dishonest bag of photographer’s tricks, that’s for starters; and then there’s the self-consciousness of the photographer — even, or maybe especially, in the candid shot.
    Do we look like that? she asks him — you know, startled, sheepish, dramatic  — when no one is watching? It’s all a sort of untruth; a composed — or discomposed — artifice.
    What’s interesting about a photograph, she says, is what isn’t in the picture. She is looking at his children in their silver filigree frame.
    â€œFor instance … Is this Sara and Joey?”
    â€œAh … no. That’s Alison and Jonathan, when they were little. Sara and Joey are my housekeeper’s children.”
    Charade digests this information. “No second family then?” she asks.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou and your second wife never …?”
    â€œThere’s no second wife.”
    â€œOh,” she says, surprised, looking about as though for ghosts.