Listening to Mondrian

by Nadia Wheatley

  But Soph had already taken over the bathroom and locked the door. Bloody puberty, Callie complained to herself. Not long ago she’d been able to throw them both in the bath together, but now Soph always took ages.

  Callie bundled Damien into his winter dressing gown and stood him to wait in front of the gas heater, then went back to yell through the door. The shower had stopped but that didn’t mean anything.

  ‘Stop checking to see if your tits are growing, Sophia!’

  ‘I am not!’

  ‘You are so!’

  ‘Listen, Cal, I’ve ordered the pizzas for seven o’clock,’ Mum yelled from the bedroom. ‘But make sure you’re there a bit before. You know how frazzled they get, Saturdays. If you’re not ready and waiting on the dot, they give your order away to someone else . . . Now what was I doing?’

  All right for some, Callie thought, seeing her mother sitting on the bed in her sarong, with the nailclippers. ‘He’s not going to look at your toenails!’

  ‘Well, it has to be done some time . . .’ As if there was all the leisure in the world.

  Get Soph out, run a bath, put Damien in, help dry Soph’s hair, hang the bathers and towels on the line, get Damien out, adjudicate the fight over whose turn it is to watch what . . .

  ‘Cal!’ cried Callie’s other child, helpless in front of the mirror, with one contact lens in place and the other quite disappeared. ‘What’ll I do!’

  ‘Just stand quite still! Don’t move! I’ll get the torch . . .’ Finally Callie spotted it, hanging from the end of Mum’s hair. She sat on the bed to watch Mum putting on eye make-up. This was an issue that Callie’s mother had never quite resolved. On the one hand, she always said that women shouldn’t feel obliged to change themselves. On the other hand, women should be free to express themselves in any way they liked. And how was make-up different from dyeing your hair, which Mum’s lesbian friends did? Despite which, Mum frowned disapprovingly at herself as she curled her eyelashes on the mascara brush; or maybe it was just concentration, for she was well and truly out of practice.

  ‘Bugger it!’ She spat on a tissue and scrubbed at the smudge.

  ‘You’re only making it worse.’ And Super-Cal flew to the rescue with a bit of Oil of Olay, then lay back on the bed as Mum searched for a clean bra and a pair of knickers with decent elastic.

  ‘This Roger . . .’ Callie said.

  ‘Mmmmmm?’ As if she weren’t quite sure which particular Roger it was that Callie had in mind.

  ‘That you met at work . . .’

  ‘Mmmmmm?’

  ‘How did you meet him exactly?’

  ‘Well . . . he came in, and we introduced ourselves, and got talking . . .’ Mum slammed the drawer shut. ‘D’you know that awful 1940s joke about knickers and the problem with wartime elastic?’

  Callie shook her head.

  ‘One Yank and they’re down.’

  Callie didn’t respond.

  ‘See, the Americans were here for R and R, like in the Vietnam days, and they had too much money, and the local blokes were jealous because the girls went out with them – oh forget it. It’s really sexist anyway . . .’

  Callie smelled a rat. ‘You mean he came to the counter and you got talking . . .’

  ‘Well, you go out with blokes you meet for five minutes at some bloody party! I hardly see that this is any different.’

  But Mum was too defensive, and Callie saw the shape of the rat now, big and brown and whiskery. ‘You mean he’s not some social-working bureaucrat jogger – he’s a client!’

  ‘Well . . .’ As if that were a question of definition.

  The man in the blue pinstriped suit dissolved, and a series of rivals flashed into his place. A guy on sickness benefit, spinning in a wheelchair . . . A psych patient, with a shaved head . . . An aged pensioner, carrying a string bag . . .

  ‘If you must know, he’s currently registered for Jobsearch.’

  ‘You mean he’s on the dole!’ (Christ, imagine turning up at Speech Night with some twenty-year-old. ‘Miss Horsham, I’d like you to meet my new step-dad . . .’) ‘On the dole!

  ’ ‘Stop being such a bloody snob, Callie! It’s where you’ll most likely be yourself in a year or so’s time.’

  Yeah, but I’m not going out with me. I mean, if I were on the dole, and my dole officer asked me out, and if he were a thirty-nine-year-old mother of three . . . And besides – ‘Isn’t it like doctors screwing their patients or something?’

  Mum blew like a surfacing whale. ‘Get out of my room, Cathleen! Just get out and stay out! I don’t tell you how to run your life, just don’t fucking tell me what to do with mine!’

  Callie lay on her bed, snivelling gently into a copy of From Terrace To Townhouse: A History of the Urban Building Industry 1880–1980. It was the ingratitude that got her. The blank ingratitude. And also (maybe, just a tiny bit) the fact that Mum was going out while she was stuck home with the kids and Voula.

  ‘Callie! Phone!’ Soph stuck her head in the door. ‘Why are you crying?’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘Anyway, it’s not a boy,’ Soph added spitefully.

  No, it was Voula. Mick Vasilopoulos had just come into the shop, and he’d waited to be served by Voula herself, and at the end when she’d given him his change he’d said ‘See ya at Ben’s place tonight,’ and Voula was wondering, he’d really smiled at her, if Callie would mind . . .

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ Callie lied. ‘Hope you have a good time.’ To make things even worse, Mick Vas was the only guy that Callie had fancied at all since she’d broken it off with Sean. Oh well, it seemed it was going to be a night alone in Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart.

  ‘Well, chickadees, I’m off now,’ Callie heard Mum telling the kids over the TV noise.

  There was an outraged splutter from Damien. ‘Are you going out?’

  Soph: ‘Whaddaya think she’s all dressed up for?’

  Damien: ‘It’s not fair.’

  Mum: ‘Cal’s hired a movie for you.’

  Damien: ‘Bet it sucks!’

  Mum: ‘Well anyway, I’ve ordered pizzas . . .’

  Soph: ‘I just hope you remembered I’m allergic to anchovies.’

  Mum: ‘I thought it was olives.’

  Soph: ‘That was ages ago. It’s anchovies now. Nobody ever bothers to think about me. Talk about the classic middle child . . .’

  Mum came into the hall, and even though Callie at the moment hated her mother, she felt her heart sink. Mum was wearing The Dress. And black tights, and her good shoes, and the little silver earrings that Kaye had brought back from Lesbos.

  Doesn’t she know you scare them off if you look as if you’ve made an effort? Besides, if he was on the dole, it’d be noodles at the Saigon Palace, for sure.

  ‘Here’s some money,’ Mum said, ‘for the pizzas. I’ll give you a lift up to get them if you like.’ She was trying to make friends again, and her eyes were a bit red, though that could just be from the mascara.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Callie said with wounded dignity. The pizza place was just around the corner. But Callie walked out with Mum to the car, and said ‘You look nice’ as Mum got in.

  ‘Ta, love.’

  When Callie got back and served up the pizzas, she found they’d given her two Sicilians instead of one Sicilian and an Australiana.

  Damien: ‘There’s no pineapple!’

  Soph: ‘Yuk, this is full of pepper! Trust Mum to get it wrong!’

  ‘It’s not her fault! Obviously some dickbrain at the shop mixed up the orders.’

  ‘Can’t you take it back?’

  ‘Not with your bloody great teeth marks in it.’

  ‘Well, can’t you buy another one?’

  ‘Got no money. Besides, it’s Saturday night. We’d have to wait for hours.’

  So Callie made cheese on toast, and told Soph to get the movie ready.

  ‘What’d you get us?’ Damien hung around her in the kitchen as she kept an eye on the gril
ler.

  ‘The Blues Brothers.’

  ‘I’ve seen that a hundred and fifty-seven times!’ He watched suspiciously as Callie scraped at a burnt crust. ‘That’s Soph’s piece.’

  ‘It is not!’ Soph was back. ‘And besides, I don’t see why Mum couldn’t have made us something to eat before she went.’

  Callie dumped the plates in front of the kids. Despite the row earlier, the pattern of the family was such that she’d take Mum’s side, any time, when the other two ganged up. And this was the way of life that he threatened.

  Oh, not necessarily Roger. Callie saw no future for Roger, the actual Roger. After all, some spunky young bloke Mum had met over the counter . . . Mum was sensible, in the long run. Even in the short run. She’d burst laughing into the hall tonight, with a great story about what a silly mistake she’d made and how she couldn’t wait to tell Kaye!

  However, the eruption, not of Roger himself, but of the date, had reminded Callie that it was three years now since they’d left the kids’ dad, and Mum was only thirty-nine. Jesus, she could still have a baby. Anyway, she’d probably like to settle down with someone. And that’d mean . . .

  Concrete, think concrete. Constituting an actual thing; real; concerned with realities or actual instances rather than abstractions . . .

  ‘Cheer up, it might never happen,’ she quoted Mum at herself.

  But Callie still didn’t feel like any pizza.

  She got out the cards and let the kids win in turns till nine o’clock, then read Damien a Paul Jennings story until she thought he’d wet the bed from laughing.

  Callie sat at the dining table with the concrete books, and let the house settle down around her. She made a pot of lemon-grass tea, then left it in the pot. She read a few pages about reinforcement. She practised doing her hair into a French plait. She made the cards into houses. She washed the plates. She read a few pages about nineteenth-century limestone mortars. She trimmed her fringe. She even got out the ironing board. And then it was still only ten o’clock.

  Finally, at 11 p.m., she turned off the light in the room she shared with Soph, and lay down in Mum’s bed. Although Voula wasn’t staying, Callie still found herself wanting to go to bed there. Maybe it was like when she was a little kid, and it was comforting to snuggle in with Mum. (Or perhaps it was an insurance policy, in case the evening was a success and Mum brought him home.)

  One thing you can say for concrete books, they send you to sleep.

  At first there was nothing, just a vast grey-white area. Then the camera of the dream pulled back and Callie was crouched on the whiteness, trying to smooth it with a trowel, but the more she worked, the bumpier it got, and the harder it was to smooth, for it was setting fast around her, setting her into it, her feet were sticking, her arms were aching with the weight of the trowel, and all the time more and more concrete came pouring and pouring from the mixer that clattered and knocked and rattled beside her, as if someone was trying to get in the window . . .

  She woke to see the hand, and screamed before she recognised Mum’s face.

  ‘Forgot my key,’ Mum was saying, ‘Sorry to frighten you, it’s only me, Cal, it’s Mum.’

  Callie opened the front door and clung to Mum for a moment. The terrible aloneness of the dream was still in her. Mum thought it was because of the window fright, and stroked Callie’s hair till Callie looked at Mum’s face and realised that it was the comforter who needed the comforting. But what do you say to a grown-up mum who is suffering a knockback?

  ‘Cup of tea?’ Callie suggested.

  ‘I think we could both do with one.’

  Mum boiled the water, warmed the pot, scooped the tea in, got out the mugs, brought the kettle back to the boil again; but when it came to pouring the water into the pot, her hand started shaking too much, and Callie took over.

  ‘Oh Cathleen, I’m a fool, a fool, a vain vain fool . . .’ Her own words seeming to run out, Mum broke into poetry: ‘Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down!

  ’ Callie took Mum and the tea out to the dining table, and stroked Mum’s head and let her cry for a moment, till she looked up and blinked and lit a cigarette.

  ‘It’s OK, I’m OK now. I’m not heartbroken or anything, it’s just my own stupid pride I’m crying for. And oh Callie, I feel so old.’

  Callie poured Mum’s tea black, and slurped a dash from the whisky bottle into it. The story, as far as she could make out, was this:

  Roger had met Mum at the pub as arranged and taken her to a place where there was a barbecue. Although Roger was only a couple of years younger than Mum, all the other people there were Callie’s age. ‘Well, maybe a bit older,’ Mum said. ‘You know, twenty-something.’ The place was a big communal house with cockroaches and posters and heavy-metal music and mattresses on the floor and no fridge to keep the beer cold and the air full of dope, and all the people looked at Mum as if she was old as the hills and some bourgeois shit. (‘You were dead right about The Dress . . .’) Roger was in some political unemployed group, and this place was the headquarters, and it was a fundraising party, and no one talked to her, and Roger had only asked her because he wanted to pick her brains about whether there was any truth to the rumour that there was going to be a new series of dole cuts in a month or so.

  ‘What a creep!’ Callie agreed. ‘Fancy pretending to ask you out because he liked you, and then he just wanted you to be a spy!’

  But this just made Mum turn on Callie.

  ‘Oh no, Cal, Roger was right, they should know what the Department’s planning, so they can organise against it. No, it was me that was wrong, to twist a simple invitation into some bloody Mills & Boon story! To think I call myself a feminist, and the minute some bloke wants a bit of political solidarity, I just go over the moon at the thought that he might want me for my fat wretched body!’ She dropped into her poetry-quoting mutter again. ‘Pull down thy vanity, pull down!

  ’ There was nothing to say after that, so they sat in silence. Now that the threat was over, Callie found herself desperately wishing that the evening had turned out well. Though the poster in the backyard dunny warned that A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, Callie suddenly couldn’t see why a fish couldn’t have a bike to play with, if she wanted one. After all, Mum had had such a rough time, what with Callie’s father and the kids’ dad, she was surely entitled to a bit of happiness before she booked into a retirement unit.

  ‘Go to bed, darl,’ Mum said. ‘I’ll be in with you soon.’ She was rummaging through the CDs.

  So Callie went back to Mum’s bed, and listened for a while to Janis softly singing to the Lord for a night on the town; and didn’t wake until it was morning.

  Mum had got up already, or maybe she hadn’t been to bed. Callie found her in her old jeans and khaki shirt, up a ladder, cleaning the kitchen ceiling with sugar soap.

  ‘Look at the difference!’ Mum pointed to a circle of cream in the middle of all the smoke-stained ceiling colour.

  Later, coming out to join Callie on the back step for a coffee, she was quiet. Then suddenly muttered in her poetry voice: ‘But to have done instead of not doing/this is not vanity . . .’ Back to her Mum-voice, she added urgently, ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Eleven forty-five.’

  She disappeared, and Callie heard the ding that the phone made when you dialled.

  When she came back she was pleased with herself, but still steady with it: there was none of the pink-cheeked excitement of the past week.

  ‘Roger’s coming over for lunch,’ she said.

  ‘Mum! You didn’t!’

  ‘I told him it’d just be warmed-up pizza.’ As if the menu were the only issue.

  You didn’t ring up a bloke, not after a knock-back, you didn’t ring up a bloke and ask him out! Callie didn’t say it out loud; didn’t need to.

  ‘Listen, Cal, I haven’t the time or the energy for a romance. The watching, the waiting, the acting, the manoeuvring. The games. If Roger’s OK, he won’t t
hink twice about me ringing. And if he doesn’t understand, then he’s not the kind of bloke I’d be interested in. Besides – this isn’t a seduction – it’s a political meeting. I realised this morning that the worst thing about last night was that we didn’t get to discuss the dole cuts.’

  ‘What’ll you wear?’ Callie asked slyly.

  Mum took a last gulp of her coffee, tossed the dregs into the hydrangeas. ‘I thought I’d just stay as I am.’

  ALIEN

  It’s the town music festival today. You’d think that would be something that my parents would stay out of, but no — here they are, all dressed up and raring to go.

  ‘Do I look OK?’ Mum asks.

  ‘Yeah, great!’

  It’s true, she does. She’s wearing jeans, but she plays a lot of netball so she’s in good shape, and the T-shirt is from her vintage collection. (Bob Dylan Live! at the Sydney Sportsground, April 1978, the words across her back announce.)

  ‘You look terrific, too,’ she reassures me.

  Well. That’s debatable. I must’ve got changed five times this morning. Trying to get it right. (I wonder: what did Bob Dylan wear for his first gig? But then his first gig wasn’t in the Open Talent Competition at the Buskers’ Stage on the foreshore at the Radiance Bay Music Festival. Not that this is really my first gig. But it’s the first time I’ve played in public since we moved down here. And somehow it seems worse to risk making a fool of yourself in a small town than in the big city. I mean, when I used to sing in the subway I was just another anonymous bit of rush hour, but here I’ve got to walk into the classroom on Tuesday morning and face twenty-two pairs of eyes staring at me as they remember that I froze up and forgot my words and then, when I finally managed to get going, the lyrics were crap and the music was worse and my voice sounded like a cane toad with bronchitis and the amp kept getting a screech through it and the whole performance was a huge, vast mega-disaster and – why did I ever put my name on the list? I wonder: should I get changed again?)

  Now Dad’s here. ‘Got your ticket?’ he fusses at me, and waits till I pull it out of my pocket to prove it. He thinks he’s smart because he scored complimentary passes to the festival for the three of us by doing all the graphic design for the brochure and poster. The amount of time it took him, he could’ve done a paying job that made enough to get us to the World Music Festival in Adelaide. Mum meanwhile keyed in registrations, stuffed envelopes, even helped put up the tents.