by Helen Garner
‘Hey, you.’
He propped and spun round. The briefcase swung out from his side.
‘What’s in that bag.’
He felt his charming smile push up the flesh of his cheeks, the vertical wrinkles form beside his mouth. He took a step towards the boy he thought had spoken, lowered his head and nodded many times.
‘Money,’ he said in a conversational tone. ‘Money, and drugs.’
The boy was too young: he looked quickly left and right. Was it a joke? He had no answer. He twisted his face away in a grimace of disgust and self-consciousness, as if a teacher had ticked him off, and fell back among the other children against the rail.
Was that all?
*
Vicki woke. Elizabeth was still sleeping, with her face to the wall. Her hair, flattened in the night, had formed matted curls which reminded Vicki against her will of what can be seen inside vacuum cleaners or the ripped seat of railway carriages. From the street downstairs, out the raised-eyebrow windows, rose a screeching of metal. Vicki slid out from under the pink quilt and went to the window, but the tram had launched itself again and was away, its little flag fluttering. The room was so high above the street that there was no need for curtains.
Vicki poked around and found a partition behind which there was a bath with one of those hand squirter things she had only ever seen in magazines. She squatted down and washed herself carefully. There was a lot of steam and when she pushed open the fire-escape door beside the bath a gumtree branch presented itself right in front of her. She leaned out and put her face among the leaves: their edges were as hard as school rulers, the air was cold. She could see a fire escape of wooden stairs and tubular railings, and a narrow yard out of which the tree came soaring straight up as if fighting the building for space. A woman in a blue coat hurried across the carpark with a fat satchel in her arms.
In the huge room beyond the partition the phone rang and she heard Elizabeth pick it up. Before the caller had a chance to speak, Elizabeth said in a slow, low, very distinct voice, ‘Don’t ever ring this number at this hour, ever again. Is that clear?’ Vicki turned off the taps and stood in the bath. Sensible plans of action such as ‘Step out on to the floor’ or ‘Call out and ask her for a towel’ clicked their wooden sides together without meaning, like building blocks. She heard bed-clothes rustle, then a stillness. If she stood there long enough the drops of water would dry on her. Would her whole life be made up of these moments? The difference between these moments and being dead was that live people were always supposed to be doing something. Dead people could just shrivel. Her mother was lying on her back in a dark box, crabbed and cramped as a bat; her arms and legs were drawn up against her torso by the hourly drying and tightening of her skin which was by now no longer skin but had become cracked leather, dark reddish brown and ridged and shiny like what you saw on cooked ducks in Chinese food shops. Vicki had an idea that this was not scientifically accurate but she preferred this theory to thinking about dampness and worms. She closed the fire-escape door as quietly as she could. There was no sound from the bed.
*
Vicki ran her hand along the rack of pink and green T-shirts. The radio was on in the shop. Music stopped and a man read the news. ‘A twelve-year-old girl, shipwrecked three years ago and given up for dead, has been found alive in the jungle of Sumatra, covered in moss. It is believed that she kept herself alive by absorbing pollen through her skin.’
Two salesgirls were leaning against the front counter. One of them was holding a bottle of metho and a soft cloth. Their eyes met.
‘Moss?’ said one. ‘Pfff. She absorbed pollen through her skin?’
They laughed. Vicki watched them closely, ready to be included in their amusement, to roll her shoulders in scepticism as they did, but they pretended not to see her and turned back to their contemplation of the street outside. In a minute one of them would come over and tell Vicki to stop handling the clothes.
Vicki knew what her retort would be: ‘Don’t be silly.’ She would turn her mouth down, and her eyes would become cold, glittering slits. And if a waiter said anything to her about going straight through to the toilet without being a customer of the cafe, she would put her hand on her hip and say, ‘First I piss, then I eat – do you mind?’ And then she would order something really cheap, like one donut or a packet of CCs. In this frame of mind, savage with homesickness and loneliness, she roamed the city, daring it to tackle her. It paid her no attention.
*
Athena understood why people gave up playing an instrument. She knew she did not play well, that her playing, even when correct, was like someone reciting a lesson in an obedient voice, without inflection or emotion, without understanding: a betrayal of music. She took her hands off the keyboard. There was dust on all the keys except those an octave either side of middle C. She closed the lid.
She stood at the tramstop opposite the long railed side of the cemetery. Someone had written in black texta on the lamp-post DARREN WAR LOURD. No tram was in sight, but she saw an orange campervan coming fast down the street, heading south. It had neat curtains and a sink, and a lone man at the wheel. He and Athena exchanged a friendly look and she got in and he turned the van round and drove the other way, on to the freeway and out past the turn-off to the airport and the Italian houses with white porticos and palm trees, past the city limits and the wreckers’ yards and the paddocks where broken-winded horses stood patiently at the wire and out on to the great basalt plains with their tall thistles nodding, and further and further until it was desert with a sky so dry and high that they slept out on the ground at night with never a drop of dew.
There was still no tram coming. It was lazy to wait when she could be walking, and only three-quarters of a mile.
When Vicki saw her for the second time, Athena was standing in the wide doorway of the bookshop, arms folded and head tilted back, scanning the window covered in handprinted cards on which people advertised rooms to let in their rented houses. Athena lived, for as long it took to read a card, in each sunny cottage, attractive older-style flat, spacious house, quaint old terrace, large balcony room with fireplace, collective household with thriving veggie garden. Her children dematerialised, her husband died painlessly in a fall from a mountain. What curtains she would sew! What private order she would establish and maintain, what handfuls of flowers she would stick in vegemite jars, how sweetly and deeply she would sleep, and between what fresh sheets!
Vicki saw Athena’s foot in its thick sock and sandal. She wanted Athena to recognise her, but she prepared a speech of reminder just in case, though it galled her that all she could think of to say was ‘Remember me? I’m Morty’s sister.’ She reached out and tugged at Athena’s sleeve. Athena jumped and turned and blushed. She’s shy, thought Vicki.
‘Vicki! Are you all right?’ The girl was white, and looked tightly bound into her clothes.
Vicki nodded. Until that moment she had not realised that she was not all right. ‘I feel a bit funny,’ she said. ‘I feel as if part of my brain has sort of come away, at the back.’ She raised one hand to indicate the trouble spot.
A hypochondriac, thought Athena. ‘Is Elizabeth here too?’
‘No. She’s still asleep. I can’t live there. There’s only one bed. I was looking at the house ads.’
‘Does Elizabeth know?’
‘Know what?’
‘She’ll want you to stay with her, won’t she?’
Vicki began to jabber. ‘Do you want to know what kind of person Elizabeth is? She’s the kind of person who doesn’t slow down when she comes to an automatic door. She buys herself a pair of jeans and gives them to you straight away because they’re stiff and she’s too impatient to wear them in, then three months later when they’re all broken in and perfect, she asks for them back.’
Embarrassed, they looked away at the window full of white cards.
‘There are some nice-sounding places,’ said Athena. The girl was in a state.
‘Limited daylight!’ Vicki let out a pant of laughter. As Elizabeth had done when Vicki gave her opinion of papal benediction, Athena looked at the girl with sharpened attention.
‘What are you going to do now?’ said Vicki. ‘I haven’t got anything to do.’
They went into a cafe and sat at a table. Music was playing, not the usual kind of music you hear on a jukebox. The back door of the cafe had been left open; through it they saw new leaves, a lane. An Italian man with a narrow, tired face and a stern parting served them.
‘What will you do, in Melbourne?’ said Athena. ‘You’ll go back to school, won’t you?’
Vicki shrugged. ‘On the plane,’ she said, ‘I read a tourist book. I want to go and look at old monuments.’
‘You mean – like the Shrine?’
‘No. Old houses. Famous ones with all the furniture in them, and you can see how the servants did the cooking, and the funny bathrooms. Elizabeth hates that kind of thing.’
‘I can’t believe she’s really as bad as all that,’ said Athena.
The coffee came.
‘What’s that in the cage in your yard, Athena?’
‘A rabbit. I’m going to let it out.’
‘Won’t cats eat it?’
‘Not if I take it to the country.’
‘Once humans have touched them,’ said Vicki, ‘the other animals can smell it on them, and they kill them. Nature red in tooth and claw.’ She curved her fingers and bared her teeth.
Again Athena stared at her. There was a sudden flutter of colour in the corner of her eye. ‘What was that?’
‘I saw it too,’ said Vicki. ‘I think there’s a lady out the back with a net dress on.’
‘At eleven o’clock in the morning?’
‘Maybe she’s getting married.’ Vicki blew on her coffee. ‘Funny music, isn’t it. Arab or something.’
‘It’s a tango,’ said Athena.
*
Spring came. In the mornings, when the first person opened the back door, the whole bulk of air in the house shifted and warmed. Women sighed in expensive dress shops, as if even to contemplate fine stuffs were too much to bear. Dexter took Arthur to the National Gallery. On the way he spoke to the boy in magisterial tones about the lives of artists: Dexter loved tales of exalted suffering, of war and failure and unsympathetic wives and alcoholism. Arthur loitered in front of an etching called Se Repulen: two devils, one wielding a huge pair of scissors with which he was about to cut the other’s toenails. ‘Looks like me and Mum,’ said Arthur.
Philip, too, got out the clippers and trimmed Poppy’s toenails while she recited, for her exam, the circulation of the blood. ‘The right atrium contracts,’ she droned, ‘and the left . . .’ ‘I thought it was “auricle’’,’ said Philip. ‘It used to be,’ said Poppy, ‘but not any more. They’ve changed the name.’ ‘How the hell can they change the name of something?’ said Philip. He dug the lower blade of the clippers under the nail of her big toe and snapped the handle to. She gasped. The lump of nail flew across the room and bounced off the desk leg.
Elizabeth used the presence of Vicki at her place as an excuse for sleeping nearly every night at Philip’s. He did not mind: he was not the kind of person who could be bothered minding. But he stayed out later, fell into strange beds in houses where a boiling saucepan might as easily contain a syringe as an egg; he excited pointless passions in girls who knew no better than to sprawl for hours among empty pizza boxes at the studio and wait for somebody to notice them. He came home at that hour when light is not yet anything more than the exaggerated whiteness of a shirt flung against a bookcase, a higher gloss on the back of a kitchen chair. Poppy left her writings on the table and he read them eagerly: her happy flights of fancy, her visions of an adult world, her lists of invented names: the endless ingenuity of the only child. ‘Finn and Angela have arrived on Dasnin,’ he read in the light of the open refrigerator, ‘to find an abandoned and desertous planet completely devoid of any living form.’ If he came home late enough he found her sitting up to her solitary breakfast. She had cleared the table and placed before her a cup of tea and a plate of toast and bacon. She had already been out for a jog around the park. She was clean and bright. She read as she ate; some great work or other, Norah of Billabong, The Once and Future King. She did not leap up and swamp him with greetings: she raised her face to him with her composed, modest smile. All about her was the order which she had created. God, the joy of her, the pleasure! He put down his guitar case. Will anyone ever love her as much as he does?
Vicki slept and woke alone in the high room. She was scrupulous about keeping her clothes in the suitcase, out of the way behind the partition. One day she tried on all her sister’s things: the slender shoes, the Italian cotton, the crushable linen, garments whose subtle cut invested their mannish shapes with a femininity so intense that Vicki, standing before the mirror, saw herself to be not yet an adult sexual being. She staggered to the fire escape in the towering heels, pushed open the door, and walked straight into the tree. Its fingery leaves flicked her across the open eye and she cried out and crouched with her hands over her face, blinded with shock and gushes of chemical tears. A voice she did not recognise as her own choked and groaned. She crawled back inside in the stupid shoes and curled up on the bed, weeping with self-pity and foolishness. She wanted to tell Athena.
The back door was open. She tiptoed down the passage. Athena was lying under a blanket on the big bed with her back to the door.
‘Are you sick?’ said Vicki.
‘No,’ said Athena. ‘Just having a read before the kids get home.’
‘Don’t get up,’ said Vicki. ‘I’ll sit at the desk and draw or something.’
The scratching of the lead pencil put Athena to sleep. She half-woke once or twice, when the phone rang and Vicki scampered down the hall to answer it, and when music came floating from the kitchen radio and plates rattled dully in water. Good grief, thought Athena, she’s washing up.
Athena’s life was mysterious to Vicki. She seemed contained, without needs, never restless.
‘I’m bored,’ said Vicki. ‘Un-bore me, Thena!’
Athena laughed. ‘I don’t even know what boredom is.’
But how could she not know? thought Vicki, watching jealously out the front window the arrival of Athena’s friend to visit with her two children: the slow ritual of getting out of the car, the back door held open against the hip, the unstrapping of small bodies, the unloading of the blue plastic nappy bag, the toys, the pencils, the Viking helmet, the Maya temple colouring book; the endless patience with the whining, twining children; the slow talking about nothing in particular; the friend gasbagging about health and sickness while Athena stood ironing at the board, keeping her head half-turned to show that she was still listening.
‘The woman next door,’ said the friend, ‘went and had colonic irrigations. And the lady who did them found stuff inside her that she’d eaten ten years ago!’
‘How could she tell?’ said Athena.
‘Anyway,’ said the friend, ‘she rang up and told me he’d gone off with some child, a girl of eighteen. So I said to her, “Get some interesting knitting. Something with a complicated pattern. And stay home and just sit it out.’’ And that’s what she did.’
They were talking like this when Vicki left to have her hair cut, and they were still talking like this when she got back, the only difference being that the table was now covered in dirty cups and cake crumbs.
‘Look!’ cried Vicki. ‘Now I feel terrific. Is that red mark on the back of my neck still there? Do you know what that is? She cut the squared-off bit at the back with those shears.’
‘Clippers?’ said the friend.
‘Yes! Clippety clip! And once s
he was going clippety clip right into my skin!’ She gave a high, excited laugh.
The two mothers looked at her with their calm smiles. She felt as jerky as a puppet.
‘Last time I had my hair cut short back home,’ Vicki chattered on, rushing to the round mirror in the corner, ‘I looked so ugly that I cried all night. And when I woke up in the morning my eyes were so swollen that I looked like a cane toad!’
‘You certainly don’t look ugly now,’ said the friend, in her slow drawl.
‘I know!’ said Vicki. ‘I’m so elegant now that I ought to be lined up and shot!’
The friend laughed, but Athena heard Vicki trying for Elizabeth’s smart tone, and it squeezed her heart.
Vicki began to hang round the Foxes’ house in Bunker Street earlier each day. They heard her old pushbike crash against the rubbish bins at breakfast time. She sprang up the concrete steps, checked her hair in the glass, and stayed an hour; ate an egg that Dexter had poached for himself; tried to make herself useful and agreeable, though she was domestically incompetent: she tipped tea-leaves down the sink and blocked it; she put embers from the pot-belly stove into a plastic bucket and melted it. But she began to know where things were, she was cheerful company, she laughed at Dexter’s jokes, she played with Arthur. She laced his boots for him, though he had been able to do it himself for years.
‘Can I walk down to school with you?’ she said. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Yes,’ said Arthur, with his nose in a cereal packet.
‘You do mind?’
‘I mean yes, you can come.’
When the mail arrived and Athena opened envelopes, Vicki watched and said, ‘I never get any letters.’
Athena suppressed an impulse to say, ‘You can read mine.’
Vicki loved their lavatory in the corner of the yard, its shelves made of brick and timber stuffed with old paperbacks, broken tools, camping gear and boxes of worn-down coloured pencils. She loved the notes they left for each other, the drawings and silly rhymes, the embarrassing singing, the vegetable garden, the fluster under which lay a generous order, the rushes of activity followed by periods of sunny calm: Vicki was in love with the house, with the family, with the whole establishment of it.