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Welcome to Ord City. Adrian Deans
Читать онлайн.Название Welcome to Ord City
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780648848318
Автор произведения Adrian Deans
Издательство Ingram
‘Pardon?’
Tanya was tall and blonde – the light to his dark – and, as ever, he found himself dazzled and took a few moments to adjust.
‘Oh … yes. Two, one … but they left it very late.’
‘That must have been exciting.’
She kissed him on the nose and walked back into the room from which she had emerged when he opened the door. Asif poured two cups of chai from the pot she had prepared in anticipation of his return and followed her into the best room of the apartment.
Tanya’s studio was supposed to be the living room, but the walls were covered with her strange paintings. The large table was invisible under paints and brushes, but also the clays, wires and bric-a-brac of her various sculptures. And empty water bottles. Like most Australians, Tanya didn’t trust the water in Ord City. Even the chai was made with bottled water.
Around the room were easels set up with paintings at various phases of completion. Asif found a place for her cup and sat back in the battered old armchair holding his chai in both hands. Tanya herself was a work of art – beautiful and complex, and utterly beyond his previous experience of women.
‘What are you working on?’
Tanya picked up her cup and eyed him over the rim.
‘You.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes … what do you think?’
She indicated one of the larger canvases which was split in half by an oblique line, dividing two different scenes. One was a flat red desert, and the other was a chaotic ocean of colour and shapes only partly perceived.
‘I don’t understand it.’
‘I think you could if you tried.’
‘I am trying. How can such a strange painting be me? It looks nothing like me.’
‘It’s how I see you.’
Asif looked again at the painting, trying to see what she saw.
‘It’s half desert and half chaos,’ he said.
‘Exactly … just like you.’
Asif was shocked, but also intrigued.
‘How am I a desert?’
‘There are several ways,’ she replied, taking a sip of her chai and contemplating her work with fresh eyes. ‘For a start you are hot and dangerous.’
‘So is lava.’
‘But lava is flowing … you are solid, hard, unmoving.’
‘Unmoving?’
‘And there is mystery about you … an infinite mystery.’
Asif glanced at her, conscious of the data stick in his pocket, but she was still gazing at the painting, as though discovering new insights.
‘What about the other part,’ he asked, ‘… the strange shapes and colours like a breaking wave?’
‘That is also you,’ she said. ‘Wild, explosive, overfilled with energy … ’
‘It looks like the wave will swamp the desert and wash the sand away.’
‘The wave can never swamp the desert,’ she replied. ‘The desert is too great.’
‘So the chaos can never wash away the sand to reveal the mystery lying beneath.’
She turned and smiled at him.
‘You see?’ she said, standing up and taking him by the hand. ‘You do understand the painting.’
• • •
Later, as his heart beat slowed, Asif was staring at the ceiling in the semi-darkness, still seeing the painting in his mind’s eye – the deep reds of the desert and the striking blues, pinks and greens of the ocean.
‘It’s more than just me,’ said Asif. ‘It’s us.’
‘What is?’ she murmured, her eyes closed.
‘The painting … it’s both of us.’
‘You think so?’
‘Of course. We are a contrast but also a coming together of different lives and cultures.’
She was silent for a while and he thought she had fallen asleep, but then she said, ‘We’re not so different. We share the same values.’
Asif was immediately confronted with a vision of Razzaq’s angry face. Tanya shared his Habal Tong philosophy but knew nothing of the cell.
‘Mostly,’ he agreed.
‘Not mostly,’ she laughed, ‘… totally. I couldn’t love a man who didn’t share my values and I know you do.’
‘But what about our work?’ he said. ‘You create and I destroy.’
‘You’re being deliberately superficial,’ she chided. ‘You don’t destroy. You mine minerals to create the basis for modern life.’
‘Through destruction … and I enjoy destruction.’
‘You create also … in the most important ways imaginable.’
‘I’m not very good.’
Since he’d been with Tanya, Asif had tried his hand at sculpture – carving and polishing the oddly shaped lumps of silvery magnetite he brought home from the mine and releasing their inner lives and beauty.
‘You’re better than you know,’ she said, then changed the subject.
‘When you get your citizenship, we should go to Sydney.’
‘What?’
It was a bizarre idea. Sydney was a mythical place – the Emerald City in the Land of Oz.
‘To live?’ he asked.
‘No … at least, not yet. I haven’t finished my work in OC … and there aren’t too many mining jobs in Sydney.’
‘Then why go there?’
‘Because Sydney is where I come from. My family are there and I’d like you to meet them.’
‘I’d like to meet them also,’ he agreed, with a sinking heart as he remembered his own family back in Bangladesh. He had sent money over the years but they had never accumulated enough to bring the whole family to Ord City. His mother could have come. His younger siblings could have come. But always they wanted more money so the entire extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins – half the displaced village – could all come out together. And in the meantime, the money was spent on survival.
‘Will your family like me?’ he asked.
‘They already like you,’ she said, snuggling her bottom up against him and moments later her breathing was long and deep.
Asif enjoyed several seconds of indescribable bliss as he basked in the glow of his love for her.
Then he remembered Razzaq.
Tuesday: Eleven Days Before the First Wave
Chapter 3
The Faded Flotsam
of Absent Lives
The heat was unbelievable.
Conan had landed in Ord City on the Monday afternoon and gone to the Kimberley Grand Hotel where he had a room on the 11th floor.
The next morning, he opened the door onto his small balcony and was assailed by the crushing heat and humidity. Within seconds the sweat began to bead on his brow and under his arms, but he stayed outside to acclimatise