Falling into Place

by Pamela Mc Casker

  “The race was yours, fuck-wit!”

  “No. Not once I’d seen you, vulnerable.”

  “But I’d muscled in on your race…”

  “Mm. Sprints weren’t enough. Ya had to win the slow race too.” Alex thumps the wall.

  “You should have taken what you wanted, Alex.”

  “I didn’t want it badly enough back then. I do now. I’ll fight you from now on. May the best man win,” says Alex.

  “He will,” says Clive. “Despite my abysmal character. I knew how you saw me, I hated the me that I saw through your eyes.”

  “You knew what I thought of you?”

  “I wanted to win everything back then. The night of the vanilla ice cream I saw my future. Ugly!”

  “So vanilla ice-cream with sparkles is your antidote to an ugly life?”

  “If it has Claire in it. Pragmatic marriages end up fairy tales.”

  Chapter 33

  Cyn Plots

  Arcadia

  Saturday

  I’m glad I’m home alone, getting in touch with my feelings. Anger splashes across the page when I press hard on my down strokes. They emerge fat and deliberate. Nothing wrong with well-directed anger. My rising strokes are buoyant, airy. Few see the lighter side of me.

  A pity! I love my split nib pen. My split-nib self. No other pen could be more me.

  How lucky Claire came this weekend. She appeared to acquiesce in my request re Fliss, but played me for a fool, niftily wrangling Hal as her escort. The dear old dodo was flattered.

  Clearly, Bertie was unsuitable to partner me – he’s outdoor staff and impossibly bashful. Does he fancy me a little?

  Claire had had no prior knowledge of the ball, no clue that Fliss was waiting in the wings.

  And yet she wrong-footed me. I was stunned. Is Clive marrying a prettied-up version of me?

  Good luck to them all! Those heedless fools whooping it up at the ball! I’ll spend my time wisely, by finishing my maiden speech to Toastmasters; it’s an encomium on marriage: Marriage, I’ll say, is merely economics, domestic politics, and business deals closed in the bedroom…

  I lay my tools down on my correspondence set. I squeeze out a little Evelyn & Crabtree. I massage my hands. Writing helps me deal with negative thoughts, though Clive’s opiates work better. He says, ‘Go cold turkey, Ma.’ He, who has never felt the chill of age.

  This evening, leaving to pick up Fliss, he popped his head around the door: ‘These sample pills are for emergencies, Mama. And they’re the last you’re getting from me. I don’t treat kin!’

  My entire life is an emergency! I’m like a novice kayaker trying not to roll the death capsule.

  Outsiders see our solid, busy lives; we’re envied in these parts. There’s our clever doctor son and the nice one. But all’s gone awry. Our once fertile pastures are exhausted. Lush paddocks are infested with bracken fern. Paspalum weed has taken root. Livestock bloodlines are depleted. We butcher and eat our own dodgy beasts. We’re already brittle with age. How many toxins must we ingest? We’re in the red. Once apprised of her fiancé’s meagre expectations, Claire will be off like a shot.

  A successful marriage is like a company merger: wealth generated by the new entity should be < than its tributaries. We mustn’t have two dry gullies crumbling into each other.

  Love is curable once the romantic haze dissolves. Will Toastmasters want reminding of the facts of love? I wonder.

  If Clive knew the truth; that Fliss is her parents’ heir; if only he realised that, amalgamated, our two properties would yield up 50-hectare lots for hiving into hobby-farms, how then would he feel about Claire? But dear old Hal, he knows me well, he made me promise not to tell dear Clive or else!!!!

  I pack up the papers. I love the ritual neatening of the documents’ edges. I replace them in the concertina file, turn off the propane heater that Clive predicts will be the death of me.

  And now to my ablutions. They’re undertaken in the alcove off the bedroom, where a basin was installed in the ’70s. It’s still awaiting the plumber. At Arcadia, everything moves glacially!

  I transfer water from my hottie into a jug and basin set. I won’t mention my mode of dealing with the slops, though there’s a clump of geraniums on the north side flourishing.

  Something in me enjoys making do, saving the environment even. Hal calls it my ablution solution to ecology and pollution. He thinks I’m nuts: it’s my Antipodean equivalent of Brits being mobilised against the Hun. She’ll fight them on the bleachers, she’ll fight them at the school fete, she’ll take the battle all the way to the CWA. She will prevail! A card, my Hal!

  Now for the ritual cleansing! There’s nothing like a thorough-going scrub with a wind-dried scratchy face-washer to promote blood flow. So youthening! If that’s a word.

  I wanted a bleak boarding school in Scotland. Had to make do with PLC. I listen to music before bed: Wagner’s stirring overtures won’t do tonight. I’ll need the ’Sound of Music’ to lift my mood. It’s a CD I received from Clive, for my 50th.

  We’re an ill-assorted lot. Clive buys an entire sound system; Alex foists Sculthorpe’s ’Sun Music’ onto me. Unnecessary in a world full of tunes ripe for the plucking! Modern classical music is like an Antipodean landscape – all scraggy paper-barks, and scrofulous reedy things cluttering creek beds. Our pioneers couldn’t wait to rescue us from nature with rows of elms, stands of cedars, banks of rhodos.

  ‘Climb Every Mountain’ makes me want to career up steep inclines, waving my arms at the sky. If only God could have done for the Western District what he did for Austria, hill-wise. I wonder, Did my forbears think they were off to Austria but were misdirected here? How easily God’s major theme of tabletop flatness might have been modified to include an occasional high point. Even now a minor reactivation of an extinct volcano would give us ‘our’ own hill. Still, I’d never tell God what to do…Seated before the Queen Anne dressing table I see I’m blessed not to have been beautiful.

  It’s so sad, seeing pretty girls ageing and forced to find within themselves the wit to tackle life plain. I was ‘handsome in my way’, a half-hearted compliment bestowed for my high colouring, thick hair. I could have given in to self-pity. My bedtime regimen’s not as enjoyable tonight. I remove the pins holding my bun in place, and my hair, wiry with age, falls onto my shoulders. I make a come-hither moue towards the spectral Hal – the one I summon up from the far side of the mirror. It’s how I tell him things without risking disappointment from his vague appeasing real-time replies. I ask and answer for him too. Thirty years ago, finding myself on the shelf, I dreamed Hal into being. Willpower saved me then. It will do now.

  I relax my features. No serious pouting permitted when one’s lips are grooved with more tracks and tributaries than the back end of a corgi. I suck in my cheeks to firm my jawline, though it hollows out my face! Delineates my skull.

  Urgent Scottish blood surges through my veins; it feels as coercive as a tidal pull. We’re fighters, we Scots. Mark my words, I tell my Toasties who have just now joined Hal in the mirror – the Warrney Town Hall’s filled! Melting pot stuff ends badly. If DNA resembles two fried bacon rashers intertwined, how long before we choose partners from petri dishes instead of balls in civic halls? What’s wrong with testicles in vestibules? Oops! One must eschew naughtiness in a maiden speech. I pause to let a victorious whoop erupt into the thin atmosphere. And then I attack my hair with the silver-backed hairbrush until each follicle stands out from my skull, electrified. If love’s not about manners, background, breeding, why make friends with ‘our sort’ when anyone with a pulse will do? Why have distinct social classes? I rest my elbow on the dressing table. I buttress my chin with the heel of my hand. Love is a volatile experiment, I inform the mirror. Procreation is already awkward, viz. all the undignified postures it entails. Our ancestors, having struggled to walk upright, must have wondered at the need to caper about like randy goats, and fall in love from a Café Specials list deficient in
Fionas and Catrionas. We must unite with our own type! It could be a chant for a protest march.

  The noose of love proves fatal should the victim fall between two stools (oops, better leave stools out of it) or lose his footing on the rungs of fiscal stability. A misstep might be averted by a will that disinherits the heir should he close on a dubious deal!

  Chapter 34

  Ball Part II

  Hal offers Claire his arm and leads her to the supper room. They queue in the doorway. The room is decorated with swags of coloured paper in a range of LCP blues and bunches of balloons.

  She looks for Clive and Fliss on the dance floor, but there’s no sign of them. Not eating, not dancing. Something within her curdles. A beery scrum of revellers joins the queue, distracting Claire from her gut feeling that something’s wrong.

  She meets Jock from the gun club. He’s animated to learn she’s from a farm in Northern Victoria. “Great part of the state,” he says. “Good shooting up there!”

  “Yes,” Claire agrees. “Smithfield seemed dull arriving today. I’d never have guessed what a lively community there is tucked out of sight behind cypress hedges and boarded up shop fronts.”

  “Hear the Simpsons news?” Jock asks Hal. “On second thoughts, forget I said a word. Let’s not put the kybosh on a pleasant evening,” he says as Hal’s focus sharpens.

  “Go on, Jock, old boy, you’ve put your foot in it now,” grumbles Hal.

  Jock shuffles about as if his mouth needs the help of his feet to work. “Oh, it’s probably not worth mentioning.” He looks as cheery as the messenger in a Greek tragedy. “Well,” he says, “the Simpsons have done it. Application’s being considered now.”

  “What application?” Claire asks, elbowing her way in. She is marrying into the district after all.

  “Oh, things aren’t too flash, financially, Claire. Cynthia wants us to farm trout for tourists. We’d have to clear the creek bank of blackberries, lantana, gorse, enlarge the dam and set up a picnic spot for visitors, a kiosk and toilets. But a poo drop loo would be close to the creek.” He wobbles his hand about. “Problematic!”

  “Wow,” Claire says, excited. “An elevated board-walk through the paperbarks down by the creek would let visitors enjoy the scenery without damaging the creek bank.”

  “You’ve quite a business brain, Claire! I didn’t know you’d been exploring.”

  “Clive took me and Basil out walking at dusk. Beautiful.”

  “Romantic of Clive to show you the bank the bank will one day own,” Hal says wryly.

  “I think he was feeling guilty about abandoning me tonight.”

  Hal gives Claire a searching stare but says nothing. “Cyn wants a tea room in the old stables to sell local crafts,” he says.

  “Great idea!”

  “Cyn’s tea-making’s not up to much,” says Hal gloomily. “She’s crafty enough though.” He shakes his head. “Never warms the pot. Doesn’t believe in tea cosies. I usually organise breakfast.”

  “Bonnie?”

  “We can’t pay her for breakfast duties, so she gets on with her French tapes in the morning and breakfasts in her room.”

  “She’s learning French?” Claire sounds surprised.

  “Do you have a problem with that?” says Hal.

  Hal’s put her in her place, deservedly. “No,” she says. “But French is so hard. Italian’s easier and more useful.”

  “Italian won’t do Bon any good in Paris.”

  “I didn’t know she was going to Paris.”

  “How would you?” Hal asks. “You’ve known her for five minutes.” He’s sounding sensitive on Bonnie’s behalf.

  “Sorry, French was hard for me so I…” Claire’s words tail off awkwardly.

  “Well, Bonnie can tackle anything,” says Hal, and changes the subject. “I’m no better than Cynthia with kitchen chores.” He licks his lips. “We’d persuade Bonnie to come in on the venture…” he says, his eyes fixed on a random spot in the cornicing. “But she’s not keen on money-making,” he says.

  “Not keen on money?” Claire says. Coming from a hardscrabble mixed farm, she’s aghast at the thought of liking or not liking money. You need it to get by on so you’d better like it pretty damn much. Her own father had hopes of striking it rich – he bought into a horse named Golden Fetlocks, but they’d had nothing but vet bills from her, she tells Hal.

  “Well, Bon reckons money has never made anyone happier.”

  “Just better housed, fed and dressed, perhaps?”

  “Bon would dress from the Op Shop. But Cyn insists she wear her cast-offs. Says they’re better quality than Op Shop stuff. Not half as cool though. Bon pretends to be grateful, but she hates it. Now, that silk you’re wearing is worth a tidy sum, so don’t spill your parfait over it.”

  “She must’ve loved her fiancé heaps to have saved so long for it.”

  “Who says she saved?” says Hal enigmatically. Claire lets the comment pass but marks it down for musing upon later.

  “So that’s another scheme dashed. We’re fated to live beyond our means. The b…council would never give out two trout farm licences. Hopeless!” He draws his lips in.

  “Don’t get into a funk, Hal,” says Jock. “I say, old chap, might I borrow Claire for a spin around the floor?”

  “No, I’m with Claire. Once she’s produced an heir, she’ll be more popular than the Madonna. Sorry, Jock. Integrity of one’s line, etcetera.”

  “But why did the boy entrust you with such a treasure?”

  “Oh, here we are,” Claire says. “Our turn.”

  As they’re about to move into the supper room, a younger band sets up on stage. Hal scurries towards the group, funnelling his hands, he makes a request for ’Heartbreak Hotel’.

  If Hal is attempting to bridge the generation gap, he’s failed. To Claire, Elvis is passé. She scorns the taste of older persons, but thinks anything’s better than: ’Shine on Harvest Moon’. On Hal’s return, he beams in triumph. “I’ve got the music sorted, my dear. Now we can start jiving.”

  “Thanks, Hal.” Is he on yak testicle injections? Claire wonders. He couldn’t be less like the doddery old bloke who’d taken up residence under Cynthia’s thumb earlier. And where’s his dicky hip? Gone! He probably invented a dodgy hip to get out of wood-chopping marathons.

  Now it’s their turn at the feed trough. Hal insists on doing the foraging. Returning with two plates, he looks fragile as he’s jostled by uncaring revellers. The choice he offers her is ‘Devils on Horseback’ or cocktail snags.

  “Ta Da, tada!” she says.

  “If you’re a good girl, I’ll let you ride my trusty stead Beau Fils on the morrow. Seven a.m. do you?”

  “No, Hal. Cynthia is insisting we go to church, and I’m a poor horse woman.”

  “As long as you’ve a good seat…” His eyes brighten as he looks up at a newcomer.

  “Dada, Claire, how are you holding up?”

  “Fine,” they chorus. Alex smiles at Claire but there’s a troubled look on his face.

  “Where’s Suz?” Claire asks.

  “Migraine. I had to take her home,” says Alex.

  “You are kind,” Claire says.

  “Kind’s not what girls want. I’m the ute of all men. Good for transporting things. Can’t compete with a Porsche engineered to whisk girls away at speed, can I?” He glares at Claire. She wonders what she’s done.

  Hal’s rather interested in this enigmatic exchange. His eyes flicker from his son and back to Claire.

  “So, Dada, how’s your hip holding out?” asks Alex.

  “What’s sciatica compared with the pleasure of partnering Claire?”

  “Nothing, I’m sure.” Alex once again stares until her eyes weasel away from his.

  “I’m glad about you and Suz, Alex,” she says, looking at her shoes.

  He raises his eyebrows interrogatively at her.

  “W-well…you know…” she stutters to a halt.

  “You m
ean you’re glad two leftovers sought consolation in each other’s arms?” He mimes a violinist bowing. Clearly, he’s telling her she’s glib.

  “And what about your situation, Claire? It’s okay with you?” Alex asks.

  “I’m enjoying myself.”

  “Wake up Cinderella, your prince is at the ball with someone else!”

  “With my permission,” she hisses, and leaning towards him she whispers, “At least Clive and Fliss are behaving themselves!”

  “Are you quite sure about that?” Alex asks.

  “Of course!”

  Alex looks at her as if she’s an invalid or at least invalid. He shakes his head.

  Claire feels a tap on her shoulder. “Hi, y’all. Havin’ a ball?”

  It’s her beloved, a poet, and way too economical with words to greet fans singly.

  A busy boy, two women on the go! But why is Alex regarding him hostilely? Claire wonders. Her unease of earlier returns. “Hey, Hon,” she says, “where have you been hiding?” She snakes her arm around his back and gives him a hug.

  “Me? I’ve been out back snogging Fliss!” he laughs.

  Dada gasps. Alex’s complexion darkens.

  “Oh, Clive. You awful tease!” Claire makes to hit him with Cynthia’s Oroton evening bag but midway through her swing, she finds she’s laughing too much to follow through with it.

  Chapter 35

  Courtyard Claire and Suz

  After the ball Claire awakes alone. Despite Mama’s diktat against nookie between unmarried guests beneath her roof, Claire hadn’t expected Clive to obey her. It seems he did. She rolls over and gathers her thoughts. Why are euphemisms for sex always cute kindergarten words: as in, ‘I didn’t get a chocky bickie with my nookie, waa!’ And what’s with willies, titties, boobies, bosies? Claire stretches. A lick of sunlight enters through a gap in the curtains. It disappears behind a cloud before she can decide whether to reach for it or stay put. Is this a metaphor for…something?