The Children's Bach

by Helen Garner

  ‘Bunker Street is her god,’ said Elizabeth.

  Dexter was flattered. ‘I feel sentimental when I see you, Morty,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you bring this Philip round here?’

  ‘Philip? What would I bring him here for?’

  ‘He’s your bloke, isn’t he? Aren’t you going to get married one of these days?’

  Elizabeth shouted with laughter. ‘Marry him? Forget it! He’s already married! And anyway can you see me as a married woman?’

  Dexter clenched his fists and danced up and down on the spot. ‘But I want you to be happily married!’

  Elizabeth raised her eyes to the ceiling.

  ‘I don’t understand the way you live,’ said Dexter. ‘What are the rules? Does he – you know – betray you?’

  ‘Of course he bloody “betrays’’ me,’ said Elizabeth. ‘When you’ve been with someone that long, what else is there to do?’

  Dexter flung out his arms and turned to Vicki who was at the mirror by the piano trying to tie a scarf round her head.

  ‘I hate modern life,’ he said. ‘Modern American manners.’

  ‘It’s just love,’ said Vicki, turning and twisting to get a back view of herself.

  ‘Love!’ roared Dexter. ‘I’ve never been in love, then. In lerve. I don’t even know what it is. What’s so funny?’

  ‘You’ll find out one day,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘I don’t see why people think falling in lerve is inevitable,’ said Dexter. ‘Anyone would think it was some kind of disease, or plague. People only fall in lerve because they’ve read about it in some cheap American magazine, because they want to, because they’re bored and have nothing better to do. I don’t want to, therefore I’m not going to.’

  ‘But weren’t you in love with Athena?’ said Vicki, scandalised.

  ‘No,’ said Dexter. ‘Not in that tortured way you read about.’

  Vicki looked quickly at Athena, afraid she would be hurt, but Athena was smiling and listening.

  ‘You’re not really a scarf person, are you, Vicki,’ said Elizabeth.

  Vicki yanked the scarf off her head.

  ‘Who’s the pianist round here?’ said Elizabeth. She flipped up the lid and struck a note or two.

  ‘Athena plays, don’t you dear,’ said Dexter.

  ‘Well, I’m learning,’ said Athena. She was keeping her back to the room.

  ‘How about playing us something?’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘Oh no – I’m hopeless.’

  ‘Come on. No false modesty.’

  ‘No, really!’ said Athena. She turned from the sink with the knife in her hand. ‘You don’t realise what an elementary stage I’m at.’

  ‘You can’t be that bad,’ said Elizabeth. She opened the book. ‘The Children’s Bach. God, listen to this – how pompous. “Bach is never simple, but that is one reason why we should all try to master him.’’ Show us how you’ve mastered him, Athena!’

  ‘Oh, please don’t make me,’ said Athena. ‘Please. I can hardly play at all.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Vicki. ‘She can’t. You play like a mouse. I heard you plinking away in here the other day and I thought, poor Thena!’

  Athena turned back to the sink.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said Dexter. ‘You ought to practise when you’re the only one home.’ He turned over a page of the newspaper. ‘It’s a bit dreary having to listen to someone picking their way through those pieces.’

  He sat reading at the table with Billy on his knee. Vicki folded the scarf. Athena shifted the potatoes about under the dribbling tap.

  Elizabeth braced herself. ‘Vicki wouldn’t remember this,’ she said, ‘but our mother had a saying. She told it to me when I realised my voice wasn’t going to be quite as fabulous as I’d hoped. If only those birds sang that sang the best, how silent the woods would be.’

  ‘Clumsy syntax,’ said Dexter. ‘Woods and would right next to each other.’

  ‘Say it again?’ said Athena.

  ‘If only those birds sang – that sang the best – how silent the woods would be.’

  ‘She must have been a nice woman,’ said Athena.

  ‘I don’t know if nice is quite the word,’ said Elizabeth. ‘She was the sort of person who’d put on Ravel’s Bolero first thing in the morning. And she had a voice like somebody falling off a mountain.’

  ‘Shutup, Elizabeth,’ said Vicki. ‘She was nice! She was! Just because you didn’t –’

  ‘She used to like ironing,’ said Elizabeth. ‘The easy stuff – you know, tablecloths, hankies. She got cancer.’

  ‘I know,’ said Athena. ‘Vicki told me.’

  ‘She wouldn’t go into hospital,’ said Vicki.

  ‘That must have made things hard for you,’ said Athena. What selfishness, she thought. I would have been more sensible. ‘Why on earth wouldn’t she go?’

  ‘Well,’ said Elizabeth, ‘I suppose that would have been admitting to herself that she was going to die.’

  It was a patient and courteous answer to an ignorant question. Athena felt ground drop away from under her feet. She hung over a black gulf, she heard the wind. Her self was in tantrum, panicking. What? Me die? Life go on without me? Impossible! It was briefer than a pulse. It was over before she had time to gasp. She held the hard potato in her hand. For the first time she looked at Elizabeth properly, with open face.

  Billy drew a breath and started to scream in short, sharp cries. He flung himself back on Dexter’s lap; he clapped his left hand over his ear, and bit into the heel of his right hand, held it against his large crooked teeth and pressed, pressed. He went ‘Eeeeee!’ high up in his skull.

  ‘Quiet, Billy,’ said Dexter in a firm, pleasant voice. ‘Shhh. No more screams.’

  He stopped at once, but moaned and would have gone on biting himself had Dexter not drawn his hands away and held them. Two streets away a tram chattered. The wail of an ambulance faded in spasms.

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’ whispered Vicki. ‘Why is he biting himself?’

  ‘It’s the sirens,’ said Dexter. ‘They drive him crazy. Sometimes they’re so far away that we can’t even hear them. He’s like a dog.’

  The boy became calm. Athena dropped the cleaned potatoes into a colander.

  Vicki too could brace herself. She said, ‘Would he come for a walk with me?’ Dexter and Athena turned to look at her. They are astonished, thought Elizabeth.

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Dexter. ‘Most people –’

  Vicki blossomed in their surprise, smug as a child whose mother has commended her for doing a small piece of housework without having to be asked.

  Dexter slid Billy off his lap and she gripped his hand. It was warm and padded with muscle. She spoke to him and he smiled past her.

  ‘Why won’t he ever look at me?’

  ‘Don’t bother to get romantic,’ said Athena. ‘There’s nobody in there.’

  She watched them go down the back steps hand in hand, and from the kitchen table Elizabeth watched Athena and waited for her to turn around and show the expression on her face, which, when she did, was not

  quite what Elizabeth had imagined.

  ‘How do you bear it?’ she said.

  ‘Bear it?’ Was this one of Elizabeth’s dramatic exclamations, or did she really want to know? ‘I’ve abandoned him, in my heart,’ said Athena. ‘It’s work. I’m just hanging on till we can get rid of him.’

  ‘Get rid of him?’ said Elizabeth.

  Athena’s small, calm smile did not alter. ‘The thought of it,’ she said in her civilised voice, ‘the very thought of it is like a dark cloud rolling away.’

  ‘There might be a place for him, in a year or so,’ said Dexter. He stood up and stretched his limbs. ‘You know, sometimes he screams all day.’

  ‘Dex is still romantic about him,’ said Athena.

  The women looked at Dexter. He shrugged.

  ‘I used to be romantic about him,’ said Athena. ‘I used to think there was
some kind of wild, good little creature trapped inside him, and I tried to communicate with that. But now I know there’s . . .’ (she knocked her forehead with her knuckles) ‘. . . nobody home.’

  ‘And what about you, Morty,’ said Dexter. ‘What are you going to do about your sister?’

  Vicki and the boy crossed the street and stepped on to the buffalo grass. It was early evening. The trunks were grey, the leaves were green, a mild wind was moving along. Bigger boys were swooping about under the trees on elongated bicycles. Fuck off, cunt! Dickhead! Their words to each other were blows, their laughter rattled like guns. Vicki spoke to Billy as one speaks to an animal or a baby, murmuring encouragement without expecting an answer. She tried to walk him neatly along the bitumen path, but he was unruly, he grunted and tugged at her hand. He dragged her across the grass to the swings. She heaved him on to the metal seat, clamped his fists round the chains and began to push him from behind.

  She pushed so hard that his backward oscillation, had she wedged her fingertips between his hard bum and the seat, would have lifted her right off the ground. When she heard his voice she thought he was going to start screaming again, but it was a song. She pushed and pushed, until at the top of each forward flight he lay on his back in air. What was that song? Of course he sang no words, only a round-mouthed oohoohing, but the tune was perfect, its rhythm was timed to the rushes and pauses of the swing, and his voice was high, sweet and melodious. She let the metal seat raise her, she hooked her fingers over its edge, sent him flying away from her and threw up her arms to receive him again. He sang a verse, a chorus, another verse, and the words ran back to her in her mother’s voice and she joined in: ‘Speed, bonny boat, like a bird on the wing/Onward! the sailors cry.’

  The foul boys on bikes fled away down the darkening avenues of trees, a light flicked on outside the public lavatory, and still she pushed and sang. He could not get enough. She ran round in front of the swing to look at his face: it was a pink blur, he was in ecstasy. She was bored. She tried to change the song, but he let out such a scream that she bit it off in mid-phrase. They probably didn’t even have a radio, or if they did it was permanently stuck on the ABC. She slackened the force of her pushing and he writhed on the seat and clanked the chains. His rhythm left him and he hung close to the ground, dangling and roaring. He would not look at her, he would not get off. She made him, and dragged him away across the grass. They turned a corner, rounded a thick hedge, and the wind hit them. He stopped struggling. Air rushed over the ground like a flood of water at blood temperature, and he pulled himself free of her and went into it pacing slowly like a dancer, his arms spread out and his face tipped back, his eyes closed and his mouth melting.

  He made her sick. He was empty, open, nothing but a conduit for meaningless rage or bliss. She wrenched at him, pulled him towards home, but he trailed, he tugged, he smiled weakly into the warm air. She let go his hand again and he drifted towards the edge of the footpath. In the half-dark a heavy truck blundered round the corner. The ground shuddered under her foot-soles, it tickled her, and in a rapture of disgust she saw Billy step off the pavement into the gutter. Quick, better for everyone. She took two long steps, she gave him a light shove between the shoulder blades, and he walked out under it. The huge wheels swallowed him up like a bunch of beans in a blender and he was gone, not even a stain on the bitumen.

  Athena was in the kitchen and the light was on.

  ‘There was a big truck,’ said Vicki. ‘And I thought, I could push him under it. Do you ever, have you ever –’

  ‘Of course,’ said Athena. ‘Hundreds of times.’

  She took hold of the boy by the shoulders and turned him towards the bathroom. He submitted with glazed eyes and a drunken smile. As he passed Vicki he leaned on her and rubbed his back against her hip. His buttocks rested against her thigh and she felt the warmth and depth of his flesh.

  So Vicki came to live with the Fox family at Bunker Street. They moved the junk out of the small room behind the kitchen; it overlooked the vegetable garden and the shed and the rabbit’s cage and the Hills Hoist and the European trees, thick with new leaves, that grew along the banks of the Merri Creek. Athena and Vicki painted the room yellow. ‘I’ll be like a chicken in an egg,’ said Vicki. Elizabeth thought the yellow was rather ochreous, but in her relief she kept this opinion to herself. She went home on the tram and was surprised to find a small lack in herself, a blankness where the unwelcome responsibility had been. She flung the pink quilt out to air over the windowsill and went into the city to buy herself a pair of shoes.

  Early in the morning Vicki lay with the striped sheet over her nose. Billy was on the loose in the house, a forlorn seeker. He stamped and shuffled down the hallway, in and out of rooms. He puffed and hummed as he went, he tested his voice in a series of light screams, he lapsed again into his grieving, wailing cries. He stopped outside her door. She lay still. He laughed under his breath and shoved at the door with his shoulder, grunted, gave a breathy screech, and wandered away again on dragging feet towards the room where his parents would be sitting up in their big bed reading, like two figures on a tomb. Vicki sprang up and ran across the kitchen to the bathroom. She pushed open the door. The room was not empty. She saw a rosy haze of steam pierced by bars of sunlight, a haze in which Athena – lanky legs, rounded belly, drooping breasts with pearl-grey radiating stretchmarks – was stepping out of the shower and reaching for a towel.

  ‘Sorry!’ said Vicki. She stepped back and slammed the door. She was shocked and moved, like a tourist who, bored in a gallery, has turned a corner and come face to face with a famous painting. She sat down on a kitchen chair with her towel across her lap. The window had twelve square panes. Last night’s dishes stood in order in the rack.

  Dexter insisted on cooking the spaghetti. He stood before the stove in a puddle of oil. The women hid in one of the bedrooms but his volleys of oaths, his tremendous singing drove them as far as the bottom of the yard.

  ‘Morty!’ he roared. ‘Remember that little old lady we used to see at the Vietnam demonstrations? Must have been 1966. “Fuckin’ m – u – u – urderers!”’ He burst into the drinking chorus from La Traviata.

  ‘Hey Dexter!’ called Vicki from the back garden. ‘Come and have a look at this!’

  ‘All right all right all right.’ He appeared at the top of the concrete steps.

  ‘Look at the sky!’

  It was fiery down low, with scalloped yellowish clouds high up against a grey backdrop.

  ‘Marvellous!’ said Dexter. ‘How do they do that? Make the smaller clouds a different colour?’

  The three women stood in a row on the path and looked up at him. Their attention! He loved it. ‘That’s what they should have on TV every night,’ he shouted. ‘Not that violent American rubbish. They should have the Sunset Report. Brought to you by the Federal Department of Nature Appreciation.’ He held up his wooden spoon like a wand and dropped the rest of his body into a limp arabesque. Their laughter flowed up the steps to him.

  ‘Where’s the nearest pub?’ said Elizabeth. ‘I’m going to buy a bottle of gin.’

  Poppy brought a book. When everyone had been introduced she took the end chair and began to read with her hands round her face like blinkers.

  ‘This is the last time I let you do this,’ said Philip.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Read in company.’

  ‘But it’s boring!’

  ‘It’s rude.’

  Poppy smiled and shrugged. Athena stood by the door and watched. Philip, glancing about him for support, caught her eye. He was surprised: she looked dignified; her limbs were narrow, her hips were wide, her hands were large and cracked. Her hair looked as if she had cut it herself, pulled it forward and chopped at it. She blushed, and he kept her glance in his and nodded several times: it might have been the courteous nod that accompanies formal introduction, except that they had already been introduced. Elizabeth strode in with an armful of bottles and a
bag of ice. Vicki ran out for a lemon off the tree and cut it up. The kitchen was full of people smiling, shifting an elbow or a foot to make room, saying ‘Sorry!’

  ‘What book are you reading?’ asked Arthur in his loud, sociable voice.

  Poppy turned up the cover to show him.

  ‘I’ve seen you on TV,’ shouted Arthur.

  ‘Who, me?’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘No, him.’

  Philip shook his head. ‘Couldn’t have been me, mate.’

  Poppy looked up from her book and directed a blank, level stare at her father.

  ‘Yes I have!’ said Arthur. ‘On Countdown. You had longer hair and a sparkly shirt.’

  Elizabeth laughed. ‘Sparkly!’ Philip dropped his head and smiled.

  They began to eat.

  ‘He doesn’t actually go on TV,’ said Poppy. ‘He makes up songs, and he does sessions at night. Is there meat in this?’

  ‘If you go on Countdown you get a lot of money,’ said Arthur. ‘They pay you a lot of money.’

  ‘Oh, they do not,’ said Poppy.

  ‘Some Countdown people were making a clip in the park once,’ said Arthur urgently. He was bolting his food. ‘They said I might be able to go in it. They were going to pay me about two hundred dollars.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Poppy. ‘Countdown don’t make those clips. They just put them on TV.’

  ‘I want to get one ear-ring,’ said Arthur.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Arthur,’ said Dexter.

  ‘A boy at school’s got one.’

  ‘Why don’t you get a tat?’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A tattoo,’ said Philip. He put down his fork and rolled his shirt sleeve up to his shoulder. It was a very small butterfly. Muscles and green veins rolled under his skin; his forearm was covered with fine black hairs. Arthur was so thrilled he could not speak. He gulped down the rest of his plateful. Athena could not help staring at Philip. Whenever she took her eyes away she felt him looking at her. It seemed they took it in turns.