The Children's Bach

by Helen Garner

  There was soup in the pot. ‘Soup means lots!’ Dexter would say when he came in. Where were they? She propped the Kabalevsky open on the piano and tried again. She had laboured through a dozen bars when the car slid down the driveway outside the kitchen window. More than two doors banged. She got up from the piano and took a knife to the rest of the loaf.

  Dexter flooded in on a tide of cold air. He loved coming home.

  ‘Athena! Look who’s here!’

  The three women stood still and stared at one another.

  ‘Sisters,’ thought Athena, with that start of wonder which family resemblance provokes. ‘Big one’s tough. Little one’s miserable.’

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ thought Vicki. ‘It’s warm. I wish I could live here.’ Her chest loosened and she began to breathe.

  ‘She’s a frump,’ thought Elizabeth with relief; but Athena stepped forward and held out her hand, and Elizabeth saw the cleverly mended sleeve of her jumper and was suddenly not so sure.

  ‘Come in,’ said Athena. ‘Dexter, can’t you close that door?’

  Because it had only one source of light, a yellow-shaded standard lamp at head-height against a wall, the Fox family’s kitchen was like a burrow, rounded rather than cubed, as if its corners had been stuffed with dry grass. The air shimmered with warmth. The table, large, wooden, scarred, was laid at one end with a bleached cotton cloth, a pile of bowls, a fistful of spoons. All the objects in the room looked like cartoons of themselves: the flap-handled fridge, the brown piano grinning, the dresser where plates leaned and cups hung.

  Dexter made the presentations.

  ‘We can’t stay, I’m afraid,’ said Elizabeth in her grand manner. The closed door next to the stove must lead to the bathroom: she could hear the dull splatter of a leaking shower tap.

  ‘Yes you can,’ said Dexter. He took the lid off the saucepan. ‘Soup! Soup, Billy. Soup means lots. Sit up, everyone. Where’s Arthur?’

  ‘At the Papantuanos’,’ said Athena.

  ‘I hope he’s not watching TV.’

  ‘They’re making suits of armour in the shed.’

  ‘I’ll go and get him,’ said Dexter. ‘Athena – Vicki must be sat near the warmth. She’s from sunnier climes, aren’t you, Vicki.’ He rounded her up, sidling and dancing with his arms out in their big curve. Vicki scowled with embarrassment, but obeyed. Elizabeth abandoned her plan to watch ‘Sale of the Century’, and allowed herself to be shuffled to a chair. She drew off her gloves.

  A bigger boy ran in the back door, and kicked it to. He had the same home-cut hair as Billy’s, a helmet of blond silk.

  ‘Sit Billy up, Arthur,’ said Dexter.

  Arthur seized his brother by the shoulders and turned him towards the table where the others sat watching. ‘Come on, Billy!’ he shouted. He kept his eyes on his audience and made a great business of seating Billy on the bench. He stuck a spoon in the child’s fist, and turned like an actor to face an ovation.

  ‘What a ham,’ thought Elizabeth.

  ‘I wonder where their TV is,’ thought Vicki.

  Athena stood up with the ladle.

  ‘Two four six eight, bog in don’t wait,’ said Dexter.

  Vicki had never seen anything like Dexter at table. She was disgusted, and ashamed for him. He gripped the spoon so that the whole handle vanished in his paw; he bent over the bowl and slurped so loudly that he seemed not to be using the spoon at all, but to be transferring the food from bowl to mouth by suction alone. Athena could eat properly – why didn’t she correct him in private? But Athena went on spooning up her soup, glancing from time to time at the children, and spread around her a shy, attentive calm which even Elizabeth, to whom Dexter’s table manners were merely one more avenue to her complicated memories of his family, found soothing and agreeable.

  Dexter emptied his bowl for the last time, then lifted it in both hands and licked it out, pushing his face right into it. There was soup on his nose, his chin and the front of his hair. He wiped it off on the sleeve of his jumper and sat back with a sigh. He was fed: now he could be sociable again. Nothing, thought Vicki, could be worse than the way he eats. Now things can only get better.

  The soup was thick. The bread was fresh. The stove’s dry heat reddened their cheeks. The walls curved in around them. Outside the house, which was at the bottom of a neglected street, no cars passed.

  Not late, but in a starry cold that lifted them off their feet, they went out to the car.

  ‘Christ, it’s cold,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘But you can smell things growing,’ said Dexter. ‘Not long now.’

  ‘Still the mindless optimist.’

  ‘Where’s the toilet?’ said Vicki.

  ‘Right down in the corner of the yard,’ said Dexter.

  Vicki lit the candle. The door would not stay shut. She had to keep one knee against it so that the sound of her meek trickling would not escape into the black air.

  She wiped herself. The door swung open. Just as she reached up for the chain, she heard a noise. Something trotted, something dragged itself. She stood still with her hand hooked through the metal loop. The noise came again, a small and intimate sound. She blew out the candle and sight returned like the slow relaxing of a muscle. Ten feet out from the lavatory door was a cage, a derelict chook pen, covered in creeper. Something in the cage was shifting in its straw.

  Up there under the leafless vine they were talking. Vicki saw their breath. From the angles of their bodies she could tell they were arguing. Dexter was trying to make Elizabeth do something.

  ‘It’s not my job,’ she said. ‘Why the hell should I?’

  ‘Because no-one else will,’ said Dexter. ‘Because there’s nothing else. What else is there? Otherwise we’re all just dry leaves blowing down the gutter.’

  Vicki got into the car and kept her face against the side window. She saw sour street lights, a house standing in a junk yard: old washing machines, tea-chests, a car with no wheels. Elizabeth sat silent with folded arms. Dexter sang aloud in a foreign language.

  They turned into a long, important-looking street with silver tramlines. The buildings looked like closed shops. They had flat fronts and stone vases on their roofs.

  ‘This is it, Dexter. Stop here.’

  Elizabeth got out and slammed the door. She looked up and down the street with her hands in her pockets. Vicki dragged her suitcase on to the pavement. Dexter did not want to abandon her. He blundered out of the car and skipped behind the two silent women to the door of the building.

  ‘Vicki! You must come to our place whenever you like! Athena’s always there. Come round the back. We never lock the door.’

  She turned her bleached face to him and gave a small nod. Elizabeth rammed the key into the lock and twisted it back and forth. Dexter looked at the shop-fronts opposite. One of them had a dull red light over the door; its number was painted in numerals as tall as a man.

  ‘Morty!’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t you be living in a proper house?’

  ‘Oh shutup. You’re worse than Mum.’

  Dexter fell back to the edge of the pavement and they went past him into the building. The street door clashed behind them.

  Elizabeth took the stairs very fast, making a lot of heel noise. Her coat billowed and Vicki tramped in a wave of perfume. They went up and up. The staircase was concrete. At the very top there was another big door.

  Elizabeth strode straight across the boards to the bed and pulled a cassette player out from behind it. She shoved in a tape and went to the bare window; she turned her back on Vicki and stood with her feet apart and her hands on her hips. She looks like a record cover, thought Vicki. Tape hissed, music burst out. Elizabeth begin to dance: no, not to dance, but to move her body, to sway forward from the waist, as if she were on a stage, as if the audience were outside the black window.

  What is this, thought Vicki. What is in here? It is a warehouse, it has no walls or rooms. There is a row of windows, each one shaped like an eye with i
ts brow raised. There is a TV, a phone on the floor, a bed like a big pink cloud. Where does she cook? Where does she wash herself? Where will I sleep? Everybody needs a bed. There are no walls or rooms.

  Elizabeth turned round and saw her standing there beside her suitcase. She was ashamed. She turned down the music.

  ‘I’m not set up,’ she said. ‘Tonight you’d better sleep with me. Tomorrow we’ll think about what to do.’

  The sisters got into the bed: it was cold and there was no sofa and nothing else to do. Elizabeth sat up and crocheted. Vicki lay flat, and kept well out to one side so as not to be in the way. She thought, ‘I’ll be awake all night. I must try to keep still.’ The tops of her thighs went numb. But she did doze, swam lightly away under the quilt, under three inches of sunny water, crows flapped against the wind high up near the blades of the windmill, all her papers blew away, her nerves gave a jolt and she woke with her heart thumping.

  ‘Look, Vicki. It’s the Pope.’

  Vicki sat up. On the bright little screen at the foot of the bed a man in a white skullcap moved slowly along a row of people. He stretched out his hands in a quiet, formal manner, he smiled and inclined his head, he leaned to them. Someone held up a child and out came his hands, fingers spread starwise like a blind man’s, to touch the baby’s cheeks and temples. His movements were so exaggeratedly slow, and from this slowness emanated such theatrical power, that he reminded Vicki of a spaceman.

  ‘He’s weightless,’ she said.

  ‘You were asleep.’

  ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘Blessing them, I suppose. What a lot of mumbo jumbo.’

  ‘Don’t you think blessing does any good?’

  Elizabeth looked up sharply, as one does at a small child who asks its first coherent question. ‘No. No, I don’t, actually.’

  ‘It looks nice though. Don’t you think? I wish someone would bless me.’

  Elizabeth twitched her crochet hook in and out. A sucker for a cult, she thought. Better keep her out of the city at night. ‘The last time anybody blessed me,’ she said, ‘was when I took a bag of old clothes to the Salvation Army opshop. But I did get myself baptised when I was a student.’

  ‘Did they push you right under?’

  ‘I wasn’t a fundamentalist, thanks very much. Just a cross on the forehead, a bit of nice music, turn to the east, forswear the devil and all his works. And guess who my godfather was. Dexter.’

  ‘But he’s the same age as you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What would he know about it?’

  ‘You don’t have to know anything. Just turn up on the day.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ said Vicki. ‘That’s really terrible. I think things like that ought to be stricter, if people are going to do them at all. Otherwise they don’t make sense.’

  *

  ‘You have to tell me a story,’ said Poppy to her father. ‘Before you go to work.’

  ‘You’re too old,’ said Philip. ‘Why don’t you just read, or do some practice?’

  ‘It’s not the same. It’s no fun on my own.’

  ‘Don’t make me feel guilty,’ he said. ‘Someone has to bring home the bacon.’

  ‘Why can’t you work in the daytime like everybody else?’

  ‘I can’t, and you know why. I don’t know any stories any more.’

  ‘Yes you do. Stories from your life. Just make something up, like you used to. It’s easy. You go “Once upon a time’’, and then say whatever comes into your head.’

  She plumped up the doona and moved over to make room for him. He sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘When you go to high school next year,’ he said, ‘are you going to tell your friends your father still tells you a story every night?’

  ‘That depends,’ said Poppy, ‘on whether they’re the right sort of person. Come on. I’m listening.’

  ‘Once upon a time,’ said Philip. ‘There was a wonderful cafe. It opened very early in the morning.

  No. It stayed open twenty-four hours. It never closed. They never turned off the machine. That’s why the coffee was perfect.’

  It was easy. He slid into it.

  ‘At night, because of the noise of people laughing, they turned up the treble on the jukebox. But in the early mornings, in the peaceful shift when customers on their way to work were reading the papers, you could clearly hear the trip and run of the bass lines. Some people came alone, with a library book, dressed in clean clothes of sober cut and colour. Others brought their children and taught them, with smiles and soft words, how to behave in a public place. The clever children read aloud to their parents from the Situations Vacant, the Houses to Let. The big windows of the cafe faced east. People sat with their backs to the sun, and the iron bars of night softened in their shoulders. On the other side of the road, which sparkled with passing cars, a deep garden overflowed its iron fence.’

  He glanced at her to see if he was getting too fanciful. She was looking at the ceiling. ‘Don’t drone,’ she said. ‘You’re starting to drone.’

  ‘It was a place that waited,’ said Philip. ‘It was a place of reason and courtesy. On the jukebox they had Elvis Presley. They had Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. They had Les Paul and Mary Ford singing “How High the Moon’’.

  ‘People danced there, in the daytime, in the middle of the morning, down the aisle between the two long rows of tables. The songs they favoured were South American ones with titles the Australians passed over in ignorance, thinking them Italian: the songs were more passionate, more driven, more intellectual than anything we know of here. They danced in each other’s arms, with their elbows up high and no expression on their faces: it was all form and precision. They did the tango, the rhumba, the samba. They knew the steps. They never stumbled. Their arms and legs were long and sinewy. The dresses were a spray of light. The men’s trousers hit the shoe just right.

  ‘There were two waiters. Neither of them had ever forgotten an order in his life. Kon, a Greek, was as handsome as a statue, cheerful and young. He had a glossy folder of photos of himself and wanted to get into modelling. Marcello was a reformed gambler with slicked-back hair and an expression of weary, courtly bitterness. He stood behind the machine, he held a drawer open with his thigh and counted money. He had confidence with a wad. He pinched each note between thumb and forefinger. He had been in Australia twenty years but he could still hardly speak English.

  ‘There was graffiti in the lavatories. Linda Love-lace’s mother went down on the Titanic. Lisa is a slut. Renato is a spunk and you molls will never have him signed Lucy and Maria. People in the Paradise Bar read the daily graffiti as if it was the news of the world.’

  ‘As if it were,’ said Poppy.

  ‘The Paradise Bar does not serve alcohol. It doesn’t need to. Something happens, once you pass that heavy fly curtain . . . Are you listening?’

  It was dark. The television was turned down low in the other room. Poppy was dropping off. She rallied.

  ‘Yes. Keep going. Once you passed the . . .’

  ‘The Gaggia hissed. Behind it on a shelf stood a row of triangular bottles, red and green and yellow.’

  He paused. She was breathing steadily.

  ‘Pop?’

  No answer. He dropped his voice and began to speak more rapidly. ‘At night it’s different. The waiters are low-browed and covered in tattoos. They wear black jeans and tight T-shirts. They look more like crims or bouncers than waiters. When they set down a cup of coffee some of it slops into the saucer.

  The owner of the Paradise Bar seems uncertainly in control of his employees. Dope is bought and sold at the Paradise Bar. It is not the kind of place outside which you would like to see your daughter sitting, under the Cinzano umbrellas. On Saturday nights you cannot get a seat at any of its twenty tables. The marbled concrete floor is slippery with spilt liquid. Occasionally some girl, limp with excess, collapses into the arms of her shrieking friends. They hustle her outside, holding her by the shoulders and the
ribcage. Her feet in their flat shoes drag behind her in ballet position. Hot Valiants cruise close to the kerb, gunning their motors. The games jingle their piercing tunes in the big back room, the air is thick with smoke, other things are going on upstairs. The Italian kids walk in and out with a lot of money on their backs. They walk in and out, shaking out their expensive haircuts, shaking their glossy Italian hair.’

  She was fast asleep. He did not know whether she had done her homework. For dinner they had gulped a souvlaki, walking home through the park. He got off the bed. At the door he turned round and said in a whisper,

  ‘And men fuck girls without loving them. Girls cry in the lavatories. Work, Poppy. Use your brains.’

  Maybe Elizabeth would come over. He left the car keys on the table just in case.

  That night at the studio they finished early. There were no taxis, so he walked. He didn’t know what time it was but thought it must be after two. The cafe was still open, hollow as a Hopper painting behind the empty bus shelter. Philip passed on the other side of the street, too far away to determine the sex of a couple of white-faced students who were sitting at a corner table under the neon sign, not talking to each other. He plugged on up the rise towards the housing commission flats. By the time he passed the first block he was singing to himself, some old Stevie Winwood song with a riff that made him think of that small figure, arms outspread, hovering like a mosquito between banks of keyboards.

  There were people against the railings of the carpark. Six, or eight. His skin stood up. It was dark. He made air go in, and out, and kept walking. They stood quietly and let him pass. He waited for the thump in the back, in the neck, the foot stuck out to trip. He wanted something to happen, left right left right come on.