Fabulous Lives

by Bindy Pritchard

  A small farmhouse catches my eye. This I know. It is set apart from all the other houses in the village and its walls are falling down, crumbling away to nothingness. Thick, glossy ivy has crept out of the eaves and has papered over the missing stonework. I can still picture Käthe pottering about in the derelict kitchen dressed in her dirty work pinafore. Ladling the giant Klösse onto the plate and pouring the thick gravy over them so that their gelatinous shapes quiver and take on the meaty flavours. I feel safe in this warm kitchen now that the pig is gone and is no longer bashing its frantic head beneath the table. Käthe’s kindnesses are a welcome gift. She lets me stay until school is officially over and I can wander the village streets without scrutiny. Now she is bringing out something from a secret drawer set into the table. It is a Nazi propaganda pamphlet with a picture of a young German girl on the cover, a pretty girl with wheaten braids and dressed in a uniform. Bund Deutscher Mädel, League of German Girls. She says something to me in guttural Bavarian, and the words are as thick as an officer’s coat. And I just stare into that dark tunnel of her mouth, stare and stare, and it goes on without end.

  MONKEY PUPPET

  If it wasn’t for the Children’s Ministry conference, the monkey puppet would have remained flopped at the back of the church storeroom, next to the fuzzy felt board and the Noah’s Ark kits with the missing instructions. Elizabeth had been going to the annual conference for years, seeing the same presenters fire up their powerpoints, the predictable assortment of craft and CDs for sale in the foyer, and the same friendly (mainly female) attendees from the different Baptist churches in Perth: the younger ones, fresh and dewy cheeked, and the older ones, hanging on for dear glory. And the same obese girl, rushing to the stage whenever a volunteer was called for (how many years had Elizabeth seen her do that?); a heaving, wobbling effort to mount the four steps, and everyone clapping and cheering, as if she was being congratulated for just being fat.

  But this year was different. A man in his thirties from Melbourne dressed in jeans, leading a seminar on the art of puppetry. His passion wasn’t the usual shouting kind, with a voice modulated to a child’s pitch when making something sound pithy and catchy. No, his was a casual delivery bordering on boredom, which made the audience quieten their breathing, and lean forward as if they were readying themselves for the start of a race.

  Puppetry was a science, the young man explained. Easily broken down into key guiding principles. A mystery that master puppeteers like Jim Henson had instinctively known, and could now be taught to someone like Elizabeth. He demonstrated by way of a sock. An ordinary, everyday sock— like the kind her late husband had worn to his job in the council offices, and then in the retirement years with his sandals and shorts.

  And applying these logical, scientific principles, Elizabeth watched in amazement as the garment—an indeterminate blend of viscose and Egyptian cotton—took on a hilarious and engaging personality that seemed to have nothing to do with the bland-looking young man from Melbourne.

  Of course, the puppeteer was the star of the conference. People clamoured afterwards to share their own experience with puppetry, to ask questions about characterisation or how they could customise their disappointing store-bought puppets. Elizabeth didn’t feel the need to talk. She couldn’t wait to get home and try it for herself. A sock wasn’t an option though. Her own socks were too short, and designed for the days when she still played tennis. And as soon as she put on one of her husband’s socks, it shocked her to see the triangles of the pattern distort and thin out over her plump arm, instead of the pleasing tartan that used to scale her husband’s skinny, ropy calves.

  That’s when she thought about the old monkey puppet. So the next day she drove out to her church, found it amongst the discarded, broken things in the storeroom, and brought it back to her small unit, to work with in private.

  The first thing to do was to strip off the monkey’s flat-disc eyes and replace them with halved ping-pong balls. That’s what the young man had said. Always get rid of the factory-made two-dimensional eyes. Then Elizabeth grabbed a thick black texta and circled in some pupils, making sure she followed the principle of the Magic Triangle—where the darkest point of each eye leads to the tip of the puppet’s nose, thereby drawing the audience in.

  Already the monkey looked more engaging, so she slipped her hand into the puppet’s head to test it out but faltered, not knowing what to do next. She thought about the young man’s words: Choose a puppet’s personality opposite to your own. So she attempted a comic jig and a loud, cackling laugh, and then let the puppet quickly fall away from her wrist, for it felt thoroughly alien and wrong.

  * * *

  Elizabeth was determined, though, not to give up. Later on, she put the puppet back on her hand and stood in front of her bedroom mirror, practising moving the monkey’s jaws like a hinge so they opened straight, making sure she didn’t push the head artificially forward. For each word, Elizabeth mimicked the syllables’ length, widening the monkey’s mouth on the longer ones.

  ‘I want a cook-ie, I want a cook-ie,’ she repeated, until she felt she had mastered this action. She began to understand what the young man was saying. Puppets need to speak and move like real people, not like our imagined idea of how a puppet should act. As she walked around her kitchen putting away dishes, or out to her small patio to check the dryness of her pots, the monkey’s hairy arms stayed linked around her neck and one of her hands remained inside its orange felt mouth. And she understood why the mouth had to be soft—not wooden or plastic, but able to be pliable in her fingers so she could manipulate the felt and create the slight expression of timidity, a crumpled, rumpled resignation, or her favourite: eating lemons!

  By Sunday, she was finally ready to bring George (the name she’d chosen) to a wider audience. Or an abridged version of George, for the young man had told them that if the puppeteer wasn’t totally confident in bringing the puppet alive, then it could be brought to the stage and used simply as a prop.

  Elizabeth arrived early to the church so that she could photocopy the extra colouring-in sheets and set up her lesson. The pastor’s wife had left her usual note about stacking the chairs and making sure the tables were wiped clean of glitter and glue. She checked the roster. One parent helper was listed: Sue Ong, the mother of two girls, their sleek bobs cut like perfect curtains around their pretty faces. As she organised the room, Elizabeth could hear the troubled notes of the band rehearsing in the main auditorium.

  What does it matter, she thought, as she put out the sign-in sheets listing the children’s names, including those who had been permanently scratched off. Part of her was glad that the Sunday school class was shrinking in size—it was less work and far easier for her to manage—and yet the other part despaired when she felt the sum of all the empty spaces around her. She noticed that most of the names left on the list were Asian. A new type of faithful brought into the eastern suburbs of Perth. The parents were polite and smiling (some even bowed), and their children were shy and respectful, the girls’ hair clipped with yellow plastic bows and the boys’ shorts and shirts ironed in perfect creases. But when left with Elizabeth for two hours, the hair began to unravel, stains appeared on the dresses and the boys fashioned guns out of the fluoro click-it textas.

  Today would be different. She had George. Already he hung around her neck, and when the children and their parents started to file in, there was wide-eyed wonder as the children stared at the monkey and back to each other. Of course they became noisy again when the parents left, except for Sue Ong’s two children who sat like perfect bookends on either side of their mother. Usually Elizabeth would raise her voice, and force a false energy into her words, but today she sat quietly on a chair, manipulating the monkey so that it whispered into her ear. It had an immediate calming effect on the children, and they leaned forward to hear what was being said.

  ‘Do you want to know what George just told me?’ The children all nodded. ‘He wants me to tell you a stor
y.’ George gazed at his audience, the ping-pong ball eyes and Magic Triangle doing their trick. ‘What is it, George?’ The monkey was whispering again into Elizabeth’s ear. ‘No, George. You can’t tickle the children.’

  Some of the children shrieked with delight and Aaron, the Malaysian boy who was faultless with his memory verses but also rude and disruptive each week, jumped up to pull the monkey off Elizabeth’s neck. Without thinking she gave him three whacks with the puppet’s head. The children laughed and Elizabeth said, ‘Naughty, George. I thought you wanted to tickle the children.’

  Elizabeth could see Aaron falter, a pink mark surfacing on his olive cheek, but he saved face by doing a clumsy half-cartwheel, and ending up in a crouched position to the left of the puppet. Elizabeth held her breath, glanced across to Sue Ong, who was smiling and nodding with her two small girls. George seemed to be a success. Elizabeth was able to finish her Bible story, with the occasional interruption from George, who whispered the things that only naughty children thought. At craft time, she put George away in a box and the lesson became the usual chaotic mess again. When it was time to pack away, and Elizabeth was collecting the leftover paper plates (they had made lion masks to match the Daniel story), Sue Ong thanked her, saying, ‘So funny... So funny.’

  When Elizabeth got home she was too wired to have her usual after-lunch nana nap. She felt the exhilaration of success (or was it the Holy Spirit?) as she kept replaying the morning’s events over and over in her head.

  * * *

  Every Friday Elizabeth met her sister Naomi for lunch, sometimes at a riverside café, sometimes at the newest city haunt for office workers. It didn’t matter where: her sister always paid, pulling out her salmon-coloured leather wallet and the gold Mastercard. Today, it was a slick café on King Street with a blackboard-menu wall and waitstaff dressed like stagehands. For some unknown reason, Elizabeth had brought George along in her tote bag, and when they had ordered and there was that stretch of time when they usually relayed news about their grown-up children or latest doctor’s appointments, Elizabeth brought out the monkey and laid him on the table. He was wearing a home-made tartan waistcoat which pinched in at his waist and clashed with the colour of his fur, giving him more of a raffish, comical look.

  ‘That’s not for me, is it?’ her sister asked, quite capable of making a gift seem a burden.

  ‘Meet George.’ Elizabeth picked the puppet up and plied his mouth into a rude pucker.

  ‘Is it for Bec’s girls?’

  ‘No, for Sunday school,’ said Elizabeth, not wanting to explain that her daughter, Bec, rarely brought the girls around any more and seemed to favour her mother-in-law for babysitting, who could comfortably fit two booster seats in the back of a Subaru.

  ‘Oh, my God. You’re turning into Arthur!’ Naomi gave the words the same weight they would carry if she’d accused her youngest sister of being a liar.

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Remember Charlie? Remember that doll?’ As Naomi leaned her head forward, Elizabeth could see the freshly dyed roots, and the large smooth expanse of forehead that hardly moved.

  ‘Charlie was a ventriloquist doll. George is a...’ she paused for the right word. ‘He’s a Muppet, like the ones Jim Henson created. And he doesn’t talk, he just whispers things to me.’

  ‘As long as you’re not doing an Arthur.’

  The food was delivered to their table, slivers of protein lost in an airy, frilled salad, and probably costing as much as a steak dinner. Elizabeth wanted to enjoy the meal but she felt a sick sensation rise, leaving a familiar coppery taste, like old coins, in her mouth. Her sister talked about Easter plans and cruises with her husband, but Elizabeth couldn’t find her way back from that comment, from Uncle Arthur, her mother’s restless sailor brother who slept periodically on the cot in their sleepout when he visited between naval tours of the Pacific. Each time, he came bearing gifts for the girls: carved coconut bikini bras, whittled bamboo whistles, and their favourite, a Japanese doll encased in a large glass box, her blue kimono stiff like sails on a skiff, and her skin, a deathly, dense cloth. The last time Arthur stayed, coming back through Fremantle Port before his honourable discharge took him permanently east, he carried a case no bigger than a child’s coffin. Inside, cushioned in purple satin, lay a wooden ventriloquist dummy with a painted, oily jaw.

  Meet Charlie, he had said, bringing the doll, rigid and ill at ease, to his knee as he tried hard to synchronise the clanking joints and yackety-yack jaw. How could Elizabeth forget the next two weeks, as her uncle sat bare-chested in his navy shorts, clenching his teeth to trap the words, and all the time practising, ’Ello ’oys and girls. ’Ello ’oys and girls.

  The ginger hairs on his chest a curious curl, and her sister pushing Elizabeth forward—the youngest—so she would have to sit on his other knee and feel the hard plane of bone and hear the sound of that dreadful lacquered jaw.

  It shouldn’t matter, this comment about Arthur. The doll had long since been buried with her uncle in a lonely cemetery in Whyalla: two coffins lowered side by side into the grave, watched by her mother and the handful of cousins he had entertained over the years.

  Naomi’s voice broke into her thoughts. ‘Do you remember the Japanese doll? The one in the glass case?’

  ‘Whatever happened to that doll? I loved it!’

  And then the mood suddenly brightened, the relief flooded the room, and they began to reminisce about their own versions of the past, adding piecemeal to each other’s memories, making Elizabeth wonder if this was the only thing that made their time together really matter, and why being a sister worked more often than it did not.

  * * *

  Elizabeth kept bringing the monkey puppet to church, sometimes even arriving through the main entry doors with him already swinging off her neck. The children loved George—adored him!—and could not get enough of his unpredictable ways. Even Elizabeth was surprised by what he would do next, the unscripted part of the lesson where she would allow flashes of inspiration to lead her puppet hand, and the unplanned little tics and bursts that personified George. He seemed to become naughtier, interrupting Elizabeth with insistent whispers as she told the Bible story, and hitting, even biting, the children. The room was so loud with howls and screams that the parent helper had to close the glass doors so that the worshippers in the main hall wouldn’t be drowned out by all the noise.

  One day, the little Ong girls dressed in matching Korean lace were scratched by George’s left eye, the plastic on the ping-pong ball having become slightly cracked and jagged. This time Sue Ong didn’t smile or bow, when signing out her girls, but lowered her eyes so they disappeared into her luminous face.

  The pastor’s wife came marching in with a warning.

  ‘Elizabeth, there have been complaints. You’re hurting the children.’

  ‘It’s just a bit of fun. The children love George.’

  ‘I think it’s time to lose the puppet,’ the woman cautioned. ‘You can’t bring children to Christ through a monkey.’

  Elizabeth wanted to remind her about the times God spoke through a tax collector, or through a prophet’s loquacious donkey, but instead she squeezed her lips into a pursed bow. As did George.

  Let your puppets do what puppets do best, wasn’t that the philosophy of the art of puppetry? There was George—all lanky and fuzzy with the whimsy of a misshapen head—and then there was Elizabeth, wearing her custom crimplene sleeves to mask the sag at the top of her arms, and the deep creases fanning like shark gills from the corners of her mouth.

  * * *

  Elizabeth’s new idea came to fruition when she was thinking about Bec. The time when her daughter was about eighteen months old, a chubby child struggling to toddle, but with the weight of the fat nappy holding her back. Television was new to the household, a luxury even in black and white, and one day in desperation Elizabeth plonked the child onto a potty in front of the TV. A children’s show was playing, with bears and clowns
and a pretty girl who couldn’t act or sing. But it didn’t matter to Bec, who sat entranced by it all, happy to watch whatever was contained and framed by the monstrous wood-veneer box. Inspired by this memory, Elizabeth set to work creating her own set. She picked up a refrigerator box from Harvey Norman, cut the top off and painted the whole thing black. She would change the act, give George a script, a stage, a voice—freedom—pry him from her neck and allow him to roam.

  It was a lot of work, what with finding and making props and practising the script word for word, so that by Sunday morning Elizabeth felt completely drained. When the children started to arrive at 9.15, she was already hidden in her box. She couldn’t see out (a distinct disadvantage of this style of theatre), but she could hear some excited chatter and children being led to the seats by the parent helper. She felt the nervous energy flutter in her chest—and then she was ready, pushing George high, so that he popped up wondrously from the box, dressed as a little Jesus. She bobbed him along the theatrette’s edge, making sure she held the puppet at the same height the whole time to maintain the proper illusion of legs.

  ‘’Ello boys and girls. Today’s story is about how I calmed the seas...’ There was a stunned silence as the children heard George’s squeaky and shrill voice for the first time.

  Elizabeth had placed her props in order: there was the boat, the blue cellophane representing the Sea of Galilee, plastic fish, a net, and two teddies who were to be John and Peter. But as the story unfolded, with Elizabeth working, as if a blind person, to get the props quickly up and down, things soon became out of sync, and without this scripted order she lost her way. She was supposed to finish with a song about believing in miracles but her arm ached, and she could barely manage to hold George upright, let alone make him sing and jig. Through the dank painted cardboard, she could sense the fidgety boredom, the silence before the storm. Suddenly she felt a tug on her hand, like a fish taking a bold bite, and then George’s body slipped away as if he was being swept out to sea. Alarmed, Elizabeth emerged from the box to see Aaron shaking the poor monkey, swinging its arms about like a broken windmill.