The Colour of the Night Read online

  He spent the weekend cleaning everything, starting on the right with his left hand according to Sharia law. He began with the dust high up on the picture rail and finished with a cleansing of the varnished floorboards, washing and drying them carefully with a square of towelling. From a factory outlet near Sydney Road, he bought new sheets, a pillow and bedcovers, and he had a brand-new mattress delivered.

  It was upon this that he lay back on the third night and ruminated on his extremely good fortune. There had been so much tragedy that his current situation shone among past events like a jewel in the mud. He lay blissfully and gazed up at the pale blue ceiling. Such an odd sensation: alone and content in his own sleeping quarters, a single man, thirty-five and a refugee. He hated that word: ref-ugee, and the implications of it. He winced at the thought of the three years he’d patiently endured in Kabul until he could be processed. And in his mind he saw again the landscape of the motherland growing smaller through the aeroplane window, his passage made possible with the proceeds of his father’s estate: a burnt-out mud-brick dwelling on the outskirts of Paghman.

  In Melbourne, he moved in with three relatives – all men – who had already settled in Yarraville. For a while it worked, but things were never quite right and Arman recollected the miserable mat they’d given him in the laundry. Without work, he’d been obliged to cook and clean for the entire male-only household. He’d undertaken the women’s work conscientiously and not without pride, but much to his chagrin, the others confirmed that his manner and physicality were perfectly suited to it. He’d felt unequal, ignored and disrespected. All that kept him going was the possibility of finding his own abode; that and becoming a cab driver, wearing a neat uniform and working alone behind the wheel of a car in an official capacity.

  Lying now on his own mattress, he ruminated on the nights spent by a bedside lamp studying the Melway, memorising all the main arteries and prominent suburbs, and the tram rides he’d made to mark it all off in his mind. He rose from the bed and looked down from the window onto the roof of the company cab shining brilliantly in the generous Australian sun. At last he had escaped the critical eye of others, including those of his own family. Now he could concentrate on work, prayer and self-improvement, and life should be much easier.

  BENTON HATTERSLEY’S bedroom was further to the rear on the same floor and now he was also arranging his things but with somewhat less diligence. A room was a room as far as he was concerned; he’d lived in more than he cared to remember. He put his socks and underwear loosely into the same drawer and sat down on the edge of his single bed. Where to position his computer? He frowned, the permanent furrow between his eyebrows, an index of that regular habit.

  Like Arman, he had mixed feelings regarding his past, and he too had surrendered his homeland for fear of retribution. But even now, after ten years away, he still missed his home town of Hertford, north of London, and he missed also, the life that he did not shed but rather, had taken from him.

  If people could see him now they might never guess he’d come from such noble stock. His ancestors had been prominent citizens, five generations of Hattersleys, the family crest stamped prominently on letterheads and the upkeep of their sixteenth-century Tudor manor house provided for by investments in shipping and tea plantations located in far corners of the Commonwealth. But all had gone horribly awry when the mounting debts began outweighing the income. Stocks were sold, then the companies and finally the family property itself. Benton was still haunted by the expressions on the faces of those locals, the way they had shaken their heads in disbelief, that such an empire in the space of a few years could be reduced to an invalid male and his aging sister – Benton’s mother. He was seven then and still to learn that his birth had been the outcome of a fleeting romance, the first of a string of monolithic embarrassments for the family that had only ended with the sale of their ancestral land.

  For seven years he’d been kept behind closed doors in that family manor house. Now in his forties, he would readily admit that he’d been an introverted child. What strange and strict times. His grandfather, who could not accept the gradual demise of the dynasty, had required of little Benton that he learn piano, read Proust, Gide and Bertolt Brecht, and undertake French and Latin. None of it raised a single hair on the boy’s downy skin, an epidermis that had barely seen daylight, let alone the sun. What strange and strict times indeed.

  In his new domicile, Benton untangled the leads to his computer and, despite himself, could not help but reflect upon those lamentable, formative years. All he’d ever wanted was the company of other children, yet when he moved into the small Hertford cottage with his mother, nothing improved. Unnaturally protective, his mother discouraged outside friendships, but she needn’t have worried; for his own part Benton had no idea how to acquire such things. From that time forward he’d watched others play, laugh, push and punch, and he’d done all those things as well – but always alone in the confines of a small loft bedroom. Now, in mid-life, he recollected the countless hours he’d stood at the smeary casement window. Even in his teens he’d continued to stand at those same old multi-panes, staring out, watching others share their company but never with him.

  He was fourteen when Olga Bergeson had come briefly into the house as a renting Year Nine student from Sweden. He did not interact with her, but when she finally left he’d discovered a pair of her underpants beneath the bed. He snatched them up, took them to his room and examined them as a lepidopterist might study a rare butterfly. He held them to the light, inhaled them and, later, wrapped them around the hardening shaft of his fourteen-year-old penis. But it was all harmless play, teen curiosity: he liked the girl, and as he’d happily attest, he’d done nothing wrong at all.

  What followed, however, he’d always keep secret – after all, he had a private life just like everyone else. He would never tell of his first big collecting phase. He would not recount how his normal day had been summarily converted to a quest, namely, the frenzied acquisition of underwear from other people’s clotheslines. Large bloomers had disgusted him, but small panties – even boys’ Y-fronts – had monopolised his imagination completely and he gathered enough to cover his entire eiderdown twice over. Laid out in rows, it was hard to decide which were the best, which to prize most highly – perhaps the boys’ blue jocks, tiny and tight, with a motorbike embroidered on the front. But he was very young then and, these days, he’d rather forget that teenage hobby. And forget also the period in his twenties when his activities went full circle, back to the wearers themselves, the ones he still watched from the old casement window. All he ever desired was intimacy; something that he felt sure should exist, somewhere.

  He was a dozen years their senior when at last he felt equipped to approach the children, when he finally found the courage, wit and social skills necessary for interaction. The kids loved it; how he entertained them and how enthralled they were with the grown-up things he could teach them. But why had it caused such unnecessary grief? All would have been fine if the boys and girls could keep secrets. But they let him down appallingly and it was the wrath of parents that eventually put him on an offenders’ list.

  Now, in these rented premises on Frederick Street, the latest in a string of lodgings, he still wondered how things could have turned out so badly. Life had such unexpected twists – and not the least was his mother’s death while they were still sharing the Hertford house. He was thirty then and her passing devastated him – but not as much as the news that she’d left everything to her invalid brother. Benton inherited a damaged Guarnerius violin once owned by his grandfather, some oval miniatures painted by a lesser-known portraitist and a leather-bound set of the works of Hemingway. That was when he moved to Cambridge, rented a neat little cottage in a quiet street and left the previous thirty years behind.

  Sitting in his new North Brunswick bedroom, he again frowned. During that time in England when things were going so well, how was it that one autumnal day he’d found himself back
in court? It wasn’t his fault. It was the boy across the street who’d approached him; it was he who asked to earn some pocket money and he who wanted to watch some silly program on TV. No one had forced the child to do anything. And who says a thirty-year-old can’t have young friends? Where was the harm? Of course that kind of friendship entailed certain physical liberties, intimate bridges to cross, but the boy would merely gain some mature life-experience – and under the guidance of someone who knew.

  For that one casual event he was put on the national register, which meant there was nothing left to do but leave. And so he did, for the new colonies, a country young and fresh and so far away that it was like being born again. It was warm and prophetically pleasant, that day he stepped onto the tarmac at Tullamarine and marched towards the terminal. At last he could lose himself, wander on the plains of anonymity. But, as he soon learned, this was also the real heart of loneliness – which prompted his introduction to one other kind of travel: the transporting effects of alcohol.

  He’d experienced a step down in his professional career. Having previously specialised in the design of renewable energy equipment for the car industry, in Australia, he found himself employed at Unitex installing home entertainment systems. At week’s end most of the staff descended on the Rickard Hotel, just three doors down from the office, and this was where Benton was introduced to the luscious liquor, as Milton put it, and where he first discovered a special kind of faux-confidence.

  It had come to him one evening that no one wanted prolonged, thoughtful conversation; it was the smart and springy comments which endeared, the one-liners that could be tossed off like a text message or the half dozen words of Twitter. He could easily manage that and he learned to slip his two bob’s worth into the hotel’s witty repartee, recognising that his chronic lack of social ease went largely unnoticed. It was all quite funny, really.

  And in time, Benton learned to invoke some of his aristocratic legacy. Calling upon the monologues of his forebears, he discovered that he could hold forth in front of anyone with all manner of preposterous statements – and people seemed to accept it. He remembered the first ludicrous thing he’d said to his Afghan flatmate the day they’d met: You understand, young fellow, this is a temporary measure. My inheritance will soon be forthcoming and when it does, I intend purchasing something much more agreeable, a property by the river perhaps, but certainly a long way from this unremarkable little borough. Arman’s attention had been magically arrested. You understand I’m not used to such ordinary arrangements. But in the meantime I suppose we should just make the most of it, eh?

  DESPITE BENTON’S apparent lack of regard for their living quarters – or perhaps because of it – Arman warmed to him. Call me Ben, the man offered genially, unless you intend a formal dissertation. He represented so much of what Arman was not: urbane, eccentric and unwilling to accept the mediocrity that life often dished out. Benton was a gentleman and Arman assumed that his way of speaking came naturally; it was the English language at its purest. It intrigued him and challenged his own grammar and, altogether, Benton appeared to be just the sort of person with whom he might share a dwelling – though he did not tell his housemate that ben meant ‘co-wife’ in Pashto.

  But for all of that, the Englishman’s manners were a mystery: eating with both hands, passing items with his left, clearing the nose with the cloth in his right. And of course his fellow renter was an infidel – he had not yet found God. But Arman was learning tolerance in all things and there was no one he felt more inclined to tolerate than the blond, gangly, forty-something Englishman with the cultivated accent so refreshingly unlike his own.

  With their bedrooms upstairs just a passageway apart, it was imperative that they learn to live harmoniously. Yet coming as they did from extreme cultural polarities, some kind of common ground was necessary – which turned out to be the kitchen downstairs. The room was by no means attractive and Arman declared it a cooking hole, to which the other man replied, ‘But the roses, my good fellow, what lovely roses!’ and directed Arman’s attention to the pattern on a well-worn teatowel that hung over a plastic-coated rail. Upon first arriving, both men had assessed with some gratitude, the included kitchen fittings: a fridge near the door, an old gas stove pushed into a brick recess, a wooden table and three chrome chairs standing on flecked vinyl flooring.

  Additionally, there was a large, laminated sideboard backed against the opposing wall. It was atop this that Benton, in the first week of renting, installed a large flatscreen monitor and wired it to a closed-circuit camera that overlooked the main street. Nikos, their landlord, approved; it might add value to the property. He called in from time to time, to collect the rent and discuss the excavation that was soon to take place in the front room facing Frederick Street. Nick believed it had once been a butcher shop, but for the present, that room was completely unusable, its windows papered over and its floor no more than compacted earth. The middle-aged man from Mykonos explained to his tenants that he’d enthusiastically torn up the Baltic boards expecting to find the cellar but found it had been completely filled in with earth. Yet, if an ancient subterranean chamber had once existed, he declared, then he would dig the damn thing out again.

  It was the unusable front room that had prompted Benton’s surveillance camera – there was no other way that he could observe people in the outside world. But now he could look on just as he’d always done: privately, discreetly and without alarming his subjects. From the comfort of a kitchen chair he could observe everyone endlessly and he knew it was only a matter of time before he would see something of genuine interest, something he desired yet dared not hope for.

  SHAUN WALKED his bicycle home. A sharp stone had ruptured a tyre, precipitating an hour-long journey along the unmade road instead of a twenty-minute one. But it took the boy much longer. Every short while, something beyond the road’s shoulder would catch his eye and he felt obliged to investigate. First it was a case-moth cocoon suspended from a barbwire fence and the species needed to be identified. Next, he came across the faint tracks of a large monitor lizard, sometimes called a goanna. He followed those delicate markings from the dusty road into the dense bush, but it was all to no avail. The creature might be very close by but Shaun knew that monitors liked to cling to the far sides of tree-trunks and that as he moved, the lizard would also move, maintaining its position furthest from him.

  Shaun sauntered on. With so much time on his hands it was an excellent opportunity to think, to exercise the affliction that had dogged him most of the past decade. He formed in his mind a detailed image of his Aunty Adele’s new home, the two-storey Victorian-style building with the large door that opened right onto the footpath. There was a bus stop next door, and a power pole that leaned slightly, holding aloft a thick black cable that was attached to the building’s stucco rendering. There were two windows on the second floor where he could identify scalloped and tasselled blinds raised slightly and a plaited cord hanging down. The wooden window frames, which were painted a slightly darker tone, were in need of a bit of work, and high above it all, four traditional finials, domed and decorative, stood starkly against the skyline.

  How useful Google Earth could be! If Shaun could not yet visit, at least he could travel there in virtuality, courtesy of NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography. That technology had placed him right outside the front door and Shaun had scooted up and down the street, climbed all over the building, danced across the rooftop, checked all the nearby stores and cafés, and studied most of the geographical features. There was a park nearby and a small creek – and a bicycle-repair shop next to a recently converted power station. And standing outside his aunt’s front door he could determine the exact condition of its paintwork. All he could not do was ring the bell.

  Could not ring the bell – what a marvellous prescription for living, a reminder that life is to be experienced as much as viewed. Humans were good at seeing, Shaun knew, better than other mammals that required movement to notice th
ings. But seeing, for humans, was also tangled up with knowing: Oh I see, people would say, and so they did, but that was no reason not to experience things in equal measure. Get the balance right, his father had instructed.

  The light was fading when he reached his own drive and pushed the bicycle down through the old Manna Gums. His father was already at home and Shaun took the bike to him. They removed the tyre together, working quickly before the treeline obscured the sun; that same flaming ball that, no doubt, was simultaneously mantling in peach-coloured light, the front of his aunty’s residence.

  WHILE BENTON held vigil at the monitor, Arman cooked – even trialling such rare and foreign delights as beef sausages, potato mash, peas and pastry with tomato sauce. And when everything was cleared away, Arman would join his fellow renter in front of the closed-circuit screen. They both liked sitting there; and over a cup of tea, the main beverage of both their countries, they took turns commenting on the particularities of all who passed or stopped to await the bus.

  It became obvious to Arman that their proclivities coincided. He could never understand the degree to which women, in particular, were prepared to expose their flesh and he recognised that Benton felt similarly. Both of them were more inclined to note the size of a man’s nose than the appearance of a woman’s bare legs. Shouldn’t they remain covered? Either way, women did not interest Arman at all, even though he had tried so hard in Kabul to be dutiful. As the Quran expressed it: After fear of Allah, a believer gains nothing better for himself than a good wife …