‘Keira, listen. I didn’t anticipate making love, I just got carried away.’
‘Oh, blame me.’
‘You don’t realise how seductive you are.’
‘That’s a great way to avoid the responsibility of your deception. Like Germaine Greer says, seduction is a four-letter word. And it ain’t love.’
‘I’m not trying to avoid anything. And a four-letter word like what? You’re surely not accusing me of rape? And the reason I wanted you to come here is that at your place we can never be sure of being alone.’
‘Yeah, thanks for the memory, Alan.’
Keira thought of that time, ten minutes and a thousand light years ago, when they were still a couple and she could still suggest spending some weekend time together doing nothing much. She grabbed another tissue and stood up. The spent tissues clustered on the table like a swarm of grubby, misshapen origami birds.
‘You never took me seriously. I’m not as educated as you want, not as smart. I’m not professional, I’m just a kid to you.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘And a convenient fuck.’
He let out a loud sigh. ‘That’s not true and will you just listen to me? I don’t want to break up with you. I’m thirty-eight and I –’
But Keira rushed on. ‘And why here? Why now? Well, I know why now – so you’re free to go out with what’s-her-name tonight. What is her name?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ He sounded weary.
Mere weariness. Keira wanted to punch him. He was putting her through hell and all he was was tired! She grabbed her bag and ran out of the room.
‘Let me drive you home,’ Alan called. ‘We can talk when you can listen to reason.’
Keira was half-way down the main stairs when she realised she was barefoot.
‘Shit!’ She turned round, dashed up the stairs and past Alan, who was standing on the landing.
‘Please, Keira, don’t leave like this – calm down, let me drive you.’
She went into the bedroom and pulled on her tights, wobbling and hopping, ungainly with anger, shouting, ‘Two Godards – you know what?’ She shoved her feet into her boots. ‘Godard is incomprehensible! I like Truffaut! You can think he’s lightweight if you like, but he gets his story across! I never want to see another Godard in my life!’
Keira tore past Alan, ran down the stairs, and out the first door, then tramped up the musty hallway and burst out the front door.
For a winter’s day the sunlight was blinding. She was crying so much she couldn’t even see properly, but she ran to the bus stop, feeling awkward, incongruously recalling her brothers’ mockery of her ‘girlie’ run. She looked up the road. Of course she would have to wait ages. She stood there, the only one there, luckily, blowing her nose and sniffling. She rummaged in her bag for sunglasses.
There was a bus in the distance. It must be a mirage, 433s were so rare. But there it was. She hailed it and stumbled up the step. Walking towards the back, through the back window she caught sight of Alan, barefoot, in jeans and shave coat, running down the street towards the bus stop. He looked gratifyingly distraught.
Keira stared at his ever-diminishing pale blue shave-coated form till just past the pub where the bus veered left and she couldn’t see him anymore. She sat down, once again staring out the side window, gazing at houses and buildings and bridges but not seeing them, looking into her own private photograph album in her head, of Alan and her holding hands, them eating fish and chips on the grass at Bondi, Alan lifting her up near the Opera House building site at Circular Quay.
The conductor stood, waiting, and she dumped some change into his hand. Keira wondered who this other woman was? How long had he been seeing her? Idiotic of her not to stick around and grill him further. A colleague. Beautiful, of course, and bright, she’d have to be bright. Super-educated, probably had an Oxford PhD in Marxism and its influence on the films of Jean-Luc Godard.
At Central she got off and sat on a green painted wooden bench waiting for a 326, tears welling up in her eyes. She felt ill and awful and wanted her mother. Pigeons walked back and forth on the concrete, bobbing their little round heads and snaffling up fragments of an open packet of chips on the path. She remembered hearing that pigeons’ feathers weigh more than their actual bodies. Poor things, having to fly around in their heavy grey overcoats.
Keira stared at the fat pigeons, Alan’s perfidy going round and round in her head, their words repeating themselves over and over like a broken record.
Nightmarish images of her long blond hair – she’d have to be a blond, just as the princess in fairy tales was always blond, like Rapunzel and Goldilocks, and the negative girl characters always brunettes. She could just see her long blond hair spread across his pillow, oh God, how her stomach hurt; she felt winded. The pain was so bad it was amazing the other waiting passengers weren’t turning round to stare at the girl – the brunette – with the disintegrating jagged fragments of her bleeding body all over the green seat.
Her hands were still shaking. Her teeth felt dirty, her thighs were ruined like in the Leonard Cohen song, she didn’t want too much, though. What was it she’d wanted?
Love, she wanted love! Was that too much to want? She loved him and wanted to be loved back, she needed his love, she never realised before how much. Before, she wasn’t needy at all, and maybe he wanted her to be. They both respected each other’s need for lots of time for work – but all the time, or some of the time, he was screwing her, his workmate. Workmate, thought Keira, they probably mated in their lunch hours, the mate he works with, behind my back!
Keira wanted her mother now and no one else would do. She would ring her. She would go there and her mum would make her feel better. Her dad would be out at an emergency job, she hoped, and if not, they’d just ignore each other as usual. According to the timetable she still had ten minutes before the Clovelly bus. She walked up the concrete path towards the red public telephones. She shoved her shredded tissues in a grey metal rubbish bin.
Catching sight of her reflection in a milkbar window, how thin and shaken she looked, how pale and distraught. That girl in the glass looked as if she could be blown away in the slightest breeze. Her hair needed combing and she could have done with a bit of sun and a hot meal. That’s what her mother would do: make her a cup of tea and maybe some hot soup. An image flashed into Keira’s mind of curling up in the clean sheets of her old single bed, tucked in and drowsy with milky tea and her mother’s care. Safe. She would feel safe. Snuggling down into her old bed would smooth out all the jagged pieces and restore her shattered self.
She had thought she loved Alan in a mature, free way, not in a needy way. But that wasn’t true or she wouldn’t be feeling like this. She did need him. Need wasn’t love but it was a part of love, wasn’t it? Love and need, love and need, her brain was jumbled. Would she ever think straight again? What about her heart? It was a damaged organ. Is the heart an organ or a muscle? Whatever it was, it was bruised by defeat. She felt it thudding hard beneath her ribs.
This was so unlike her, the self she knew, or thought she knew. Wasn’t independence the virtue she most valued? Hadn’t she hardened her heart against sentimentality and emotional wallowing? If girlfriends came to her in a state like this, hadn’t she been the practical one, hadn’t she advised them to forget the boyfriend and throw themselves into their work or travel?
Keira was known for being reasonable: sane and level-headed. She was mature. Walking along the dreary grey street towards the public telephone, she was a person she no longer recognised. A flock of seagulls alighted a few metres in front of her and swooped on some sandwich scraps, their squawks battering her ears. Shut up! She wanted to scream at them. ‘Shut up!’ A balding middle aged man with a pot belly straining his navy turtleneck passed by, giving her a curious look.
So this is how it happens, she thought, something untoward occurs, bad news, an emotional shock, a loss of some sort, and then you’re yelling at seagul
ls. Pretty soon you would start throwing fits on public transport and alarming the other passengers and then you’d be ordered off the bus, have a long walk ahead of you in the blazing sun and get heatstroke or in the pouring rain and get pneumonia, wind up in hospital yelling at nurses, get put in the mental ward, where you’re injected with drugs and lose sight of your former self entirely. Easy to see how it could happen.
She walked on. She must pull herself together. An apt phrase. She could imagine Maureen saying it. Would she say it now? The bright red of a wooden telephone box drew her like a beacon and she hurried towards it.
Change! Did she have the right change? It would be just like life to have none. But no, there were some twenty-cent pieces and still enough left for bus fare. The telephone would be broken, vandalised by some street-scummy boys for a lark. Texta pen scrawled obscenities all over its smelly walls, she could see it now, and scribbled telephone numbers in scratchy biro by desperate people too poor to have a home telephone.
But the telephone box was clean and seemed to be working when she held the heavy black receiver to her ear. Inserting the coins, she dialled the number. A car revved past and then another and another. A flare of annoyance lit up in her and she yelled, ‘Shut up! Shut up!’ and pressed the receiver close to her ear in order to be able to hear her mum’s voice.
On and on the telephone rang, on and on in the empty house. And then: ‘Hullo?’
‘Oh! Dad!’
‘Yes, Keira.’
‘Can I talk to Mum, please?’
‘No. She’s not here.’
‘When will she be back?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you think it will be soon? Where’s she gone?’
‘I don’t know.’
Keira felt inexpressibly disappointed. The silence was beginning to feel uncomfortable so she added, ‘You have no idea when she’ll be back?’
‘No, I don’t.’
Keira slumped against the telephone box wall.
She could have cried, and in fact tears of disappointment began to fall down her cheeks. Maureen was always going on about being there for them, there when they got home from school, there whenever they needed her, but now she was not there when Keira needed her.
‘Is there something I can help with?’ said Jim.
‘Um … No, not really. I s’pose I’ll call again later. Thanks, Dad. ‘Bye.’
‘Goodbye, Keira.’
She would have to go home instead. Her heart heavy with disappointment, she went back and sat down in the watery winter sunshine to wait for a Bondi Junction bus, which came after a few minutes.
Keira got off the bus at her stop and it roared away, hurting her ears with its brutal noise. She trudged past the houses and shops towards home, past the butcher, the newsagent and the corner shop so useful for last minute ingredients. A hairdresser had moved into the vacant space next door to it, the name written in fancy cursive script running diagonally across the plate glass pane. She read it as Absolute Pain but when looked at more closely it said Absolute Hair. It still didn’t make sense.
Keira stumbled onwards, looking forward to being inside, to having the house to herself. Steve would be at the football and Nessie would still be in town. If Keira could not have her mother to comfort her, it was the quiet solitude of an empty house that she longed for.
34
DEIRDRE
August 1973
‘Gosh – is this all you’ve brought?’ asked Olivia as the crowds bustled past her and Deirdre at Kingsford Smith airport. She reached for Deirdre’s apple green canvas carry-all with its sturdy zipper.
‘I travel lightly,’ said Deirdre. They hugged a little awkwardly, and laughed.
‘My God, I can’t believe I’m seeing you again, Olivia, an’ how gorgeous you look. You’re so … You look serene!’ She couldn’t believe the change since she’d last seen her, in 1957 and not long out of the asylum. She eyed Olivia’s silvery-blond bob, white trousers and grey cashmere jumper. A silver chainmail Oroton shoulder bag and silver boots completed the picture of chic assurance.
Olivia smiled. ‘You look great too, Deirdre, as always.’
‘Oh, no – my ankles swelled on the way over. These sandals don’t go with this outfit, but once I took off m’ shoes I couldn’t squeeze them on again.’ She was wearing a dark green poplin jacket over a pale blue shirt-waister dress. ‘I look awful.’
‘No, you don’t. The sandals lend a flash of the bohemian to an otherwise conventional outfit. Come on, we’re in people’s way here – let’s get you home so you can elevate your feet.’
As they walked towards the exit Olivia asked, ‘Was the flight all right?’
‘It wasn’t too bad at all. I read and slept and they showed two films, The Day of the Jackal and A Touch of Class. A spy one and a romantic one. Both diverting and the latter amusing. I was halfway through my book when I went to sleep and when I woke I just talked to the very nice young marine biologist next to me. I got used to comedies as part of my strategy to not think about Owen. Amusing is my latest criterion for … everything.’
‘So what amusing book are you reading?’
‘Kingsley Amis’s son has written a novel – The Rachel Papers – très amusant.’
‘Yes, it is, I’ve just read that too. Don’t you think his style is like his mother’s, Elizabeth Jane Howard, more than his father’s?’ said Olivia.
‘She’s his stepmother.’
‘Oh, you’re up to date with all the London gossip.’
‘I’m sure she influenced him. And they have an excellent relationship, according to British Vogue.’
They stepped out of the air conditioning into the bustle of a Sydney morning.
‘We’ll drive home and you can put up your feet and rest,’ said Olivia. ‘Actually, they say to stay awake as long as you can to lessen the jetlag.’
‘Do they? All right – an’ how convenient it is that Seamus is in the same town for a while. When are we visiting him?’
‘Tomorrow,’ said Olivia. They made their way through the car park.
‘This one’s mine – the silver Rover. Daddy did die awfully young but he left us well provided for. I have an affection for this old car of his.’
Olivia threw the green canvas bag onto the back seat and they climbed into the car. Olivia switched on the ignition and they drove out of the airport in silence for a short while. Deirdre looked out the window at the lanes of cars beside them.
‘So they really did take away all the trams,’ she said.
‘A retrograde step,’ said Olivia, merging into the lane that would take her towards the correct exit for Dover Heights. ‘The routes of the buses aren’t nearly as widespread as the tram routes were, plus the buses have to compete with the cars, so it’s not as fast to get anywhere now.’
‘It’s the way it went, and I’ll get used to it, but remember Sydney before, with nearly everyone walking or hopping on and off trams and ferries?’
‘Or bicycles.’
‘Oh – your silver Malvern Star! How you tore around on that! Do you still have it?’
‘It’s in the shed – cocooned in cobwebs. We’ve cleaned out the house but haven’t finished the shed yet. Eve and I put the house on the market six weeks ago – I said that in my letter. Someone bought it very quickly and I’ll be out of there in a week’s time. Eve and I will divide the proceeds between us and I’ve actually bought somewhere else. You’ll never guess where.’
‘Not the hangman’s house!’
They both laughed hysterically. ‘God, that feels like another lifetime,’ said Olivia. ‘It’s near Gordon’s Bay, not too far from Beach Lane, but with a view of the water.’
‘No!’
‘It’s a small two-storey terrace with north-eastern light. I’d looked at four or five and then the agent showed me this one – and you just know, don’t you, when a house is right for you?’
‘Yes.’
They stopped at traffic lights. ‘W
hen I saw the house, I felt as if my skin was starting to blossom, my soul unfurling like a flower.’ She laughed. ‘Was that a mixed metaphor?’
‘I don’t think so. In any case, I know what you felt.’ The lights changed and they took off again.
‘Can I ask you a question?’ said Olivia, glancing across at Deirdre.
‘Of course.’
‘Why aren’t you staying with Maureen? You know you’re welcome chez moi anywhere I’m living, but I’m just curious.’
‘Maureen’s a bit – I don’t know, I just wanted to break the ice gradually. It hasn’t been an easy relationship.’
‘You haven’t written to her about coming back?’
‘I haven’t.’
Olivia gasped. ‘You’re just going to turn up? You wrote to me, you even wrote to Alfred – you, being a terrible correspondent at the best of times – but you didn’t write to your daughter?!’
‘I’ll see Keira first. I’ll surprise her and she can pave the way gradually with her mother about my being back.’
‘Well, it will be a surprise! Can I ask another question?’
‘You can.’
‘Were you able to paint this past year at Hampstead?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s good. For me, emotional chaos makes it hard to summon up the energy to be creative.’
‘I know what you mean, but I found if I doodled and sketched, nothing serious, just playing really, I was able to get out of myself. Then after a couple of months I started working properly. They’re coming in a crate, somewhere on the high seas.’
Olivia gasped. ‘Your recent works?’
‘Seven recent works.’ She looked at Olivia and smiled.
‘The magic seven – did you plan that?’
‘It just evolved that way.’
‘How exciting. We’re nearly there now.’ Olivia turned left, drove along the quiet street and then eased the car into the driveway of the old sandstone Federation house.
‘I’d forgotten how beautiful this garden was – my God, those glorious colours, even in winter – it’s a work of art!’
After She Left Page 20