The Children's Bach

by Helen Garner

  He hid in his bedroom until he heard her shut the bathroom door and turn on the water. It was Sunday morning. Someone in the street was pushing a hand-mower. The smell of the cut grass seemed to belong to some other, better world that he had shut himself out of. For a moment the rhythmic gnashing of the blades and the distant pounding of the shower covered a smaller, more human sound. Was she crying? He dragged on some garments out of the dirty clothes basket and sneaked back into the kitchen.

  She was not crying. She had her radio in there with her and she was singing with it: the voice, a man’s but pitched high enough for a girl to sing comfortably in the same register, and taking itself very seriously, sang, ‘Oh, I’m the kind of guy/Who is always o-o-on the’ He could not catch the last word. The radio and the girl sang with a light, slow, sure rhythm. ‘Where-ever I lay my hat/That’s – my home.’ Her voice came and went in clarity and volume: he imagined her turning, bending, raising one arm and then the other, standing with a blind smile under the stream of water. He felt his heartbeat slow down.

  Out she came, splendid as the Queen of Sheba, wreathed in pink steam, wet-headed, and wrapped in a threadbare towel. He held his breath for the moral crisis.

  She smiled at him. ‘I bet I lost half a stone with all that spewing,’ she said. ‘See how my hip bones are sticking out? I look fabulous! But boy, have I got a headache.’

  ‘Vicki. Listen. I feel terrible about last night.’

  ‘Oh, I know. I must have been foul.’

  She rubbed herself with the rag of a towel. Her bottom was flushed, her flesh was so new and firm that even vigorous movement did not make it jiggle.

  ‘No – I mean I feel terrible. About what I did.’

  She was not even listening. ‘I get this thing, you know? where I think I’m going to die if I fall asleep? Must be a neurosis or something. You were really nice to me.’

  ‘Nice?’ The young savage, thought Dexter. I am as irrelevant as a missionary. I am being ridiculous. ‘But we’ll have to tell Athena, of course,’ he said.

  She looked up. ‘What? Don’t be stchoopid. It was just a one-night stand. We’re not in love, or anything! I’m not, anyway.’ She gave a gay laugh and put one foot up on a chair to dry it. ‘You can tell her if you like. But it might make her feel worse. Like a sort of punishment for going away.’

  He had nothing to say.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Vicki, ‘Athena can hardly complain. That would be hypocritical.’

  He sat at the ravaged table and watched the girl dry herself with efficient strokes, sawing between her toes and twisting her shoulders to reach the backs of her thighs. This was modern life, then, this seamless logic, this common sense, this silent tit-for-tat. This was what people did. He did not like it. He hated it. But he was in its moral universe now, and he could never go back.

  *

  She walked down the sideway. The car was not there. There was nobody home. The windows were closed, the kitchen was airless, the bathroom floor was flooded, the sink was greasy, the table was piled with papers and dirty plates, the rubbish bin overflowed in the corner, and pizza boxes, screwed into stiff wands, lay around it. Athena put down her bag and walked from door to door. In Vicki’s room she smelled vomit. The children’s room was still warm. The big bedroom had been stripped and the mattress was half off its base.

  She opened the front door and sat down on the step. The cement was dry and already hot. She watched ants crawling over the hose. She noticed that the window panes of the house opposite reflected events which were not taking place in the quiet street: the passing of a truck, of a car, of a bunch of cyclists. She thought carefully about this, turning her head, and worked out that the housefront opposite must be tilted at such an angle that its windows reflected the highway half a mile away, behind her own house, beyond the creek.

  She got up and started work.

  She opened every window and every door. She carried the newspapers and the pizza boxes down to the bottom of the yard and lit a fire in the incinerator. She turned on the taps of the washing machine and poked the sheets down into the water. She stood in the rubbish bins, trampled their contents down, and lugged them up to the street for tomorrow’s collection. She filled a bucket with boiling water and scrubbed the hardened food dribbles off the cupboard doors. She washed, she washed, she washed. She tended the incinerator, and when the fire burned low she kept it going with hunks of wormy timber that she wrenched off the disused rabbit cage. She did load after load of washing, and hung it out to dry. She plunged her hands into the lavatory and carved its stains away. She mopped the kitchen floor and covered it with sheets of news paper. She got down on her hands and knees and scraped the mould out of the shower and tugged clumps of hair out of the plughole. She emptied the fridge and set a pan of boiling water inside its ice-clogged freezer. The sheets dried so quickly in the sunny back yard that before she had finished the cleaning she was able to remake the beds and tuck them in tightly. The bedrooms smelled of cotton. Every kitchen surface was dry and bare. She picked up the newspapers from the clean lino and took them out to the incinerator, over which a blast of molten air quivered: the leaves of the nectarine tree jumped and wavered in its colourless exhalation. She could hear Mister and Missus Fuckin’ cursing each other behind the fence. Their inarticulate croakings were punctuated by the blows of a hammer and the explosions of the flywire door.

  She ironed a cloth and spread it on the kitchen table.

  And then she sat down and waited for them to come home.

  And they will come!

  And Vicki will say, as they drive in through the gateway, ‘Hey! The bins are out! Athena must be back.’

  And Billy will not even have noticed her absence, and Arthur will come and stand beside her, trying not to smile, and Vicki and Dexter will not touch her straight away,

  and the clothes on the line will dry into stiff shapes which loosen when touched,

  and someone will put the kettle on,

  and from one day to the next Poppy will stop holding Philip’s hand: he will drop his right hand to her left so she can take it, but nothing will happen, and when he looks down she will be standing there beside him, watching for a gap in the traffic, and she will not hold his hand any more, and she never will again,

  and Dexter will sit on the edge of the bed to do up his sandals, and Athena will creep over to him and put her head on his knee, and he will take her head in his hands and stroke it with a firm touch,

  and the tea will go purling into the cup,

  and Athena will dream again and again, against her will, of Philip, or rather of not-Philip, of searching for him, of climbing endless stairs in a building full of rooms whose occupants have just quitted them, leaving warm cushions and sunny floors and disturbed air,

  and Elizabeth and Vicki and Athena will go to visit Como House, they will go arm in arm through the high rooms, and will stoop to examine the inlay tables, the angle of flush in the pink and white marble,

  and as they approach the Paradise they will feel the city shudder under the soles of their feet, and will see the heavy strands of the fly curtain swing out on a gust of air, and will hear the soft laughter and the slide of dancing shoes on the speckled concrete, and oh! the machine will be hissing, the tables will be clean, the sun will be shining through the glass,

  and Athena will play Bach on the piano, in the empty house, and her left hand will keep up the steady rocking beat, and her right hand will run the arpeggios, will send them flying, will toss handfuls of notes high into the sparkling air!

  Acknowledgement is made to EMI Music Publishing Australia for permission to quote from E. Harold Davies’ introduction to the music book The Children’s Bach.

  The lines on page 140 are from To Penshurst by Ben Jonson.

  I am happy to acknowledge the generous support given to me by the Literature Board of the Australia Council during the year it took me to write this book. Some of it was written during a term I spent as a writer-in-residence at Gri
ffith University in Queensland.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Australia)

  707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada)

  90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Canada ON M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL England

  Penguin Ireland

  25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd

  11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ)

  67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, Rosebank Office Park, Block D,

  181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North, Johannesburg, 2196, South Africa

  Penguin (Beijing) Ltd

  7F, Tower B, Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North,

  Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by McPhee Gribble Publishers, 1984

  Published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 1996

  This edition published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2008

  Copyright © Helen Garner 1984

  The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Design by Allison Colpoys © Penguin Group (Australia)

  Cover photograph © Pinto/zefa/Corbis

  penguin.com.au

  ISBN: 978-1-74348-112-7

  ALSO BY HELEN GARNER

  Monkey Grip

  ‘A lyrical, rough-edged novel full of warmth and uncompromising feeling’ Sunday Age

  Inner-suburban Melbourne in the 1970s: a world of communal living, drugs, music and love. In this acclaimed first novel, Helen Garner captures the fluid relationships of a community of friends who are living and loving in new ways. Nora falls in love with Javo the junkie, and together they try to make sense of their lives and the choices they have made. But caught in an increasingly ambiguous relationship, they are unable to let go – and the harder they pull awayfrom each other, the tighter the monkey grip.

  Honour & Other People's Children

  ‘Helen Garner is an extraordinarily good writer. There is not a paragraph, let alone a page, where she does not compel your attention.’ The Bulletin

  In two of Helen Garner’s finest short stories, she examines the idiosyncratic and bothersome notions of honour by which her characters – adults and children – shape their untidy lives.

  Honour is about a couple whose marriage, though abandoned in practice, persists in spirit. But the arrival of a new lover obliges them to make a proper separation and draw their child into the conflict.

  Other People’s Children is a witty, sad story of the breakdown of friendship between two women, Scotty and Ruth, and the collapse of their collective household. Scotty loves Ruth’s daughter as only the childless can love other people’s children, but the broken friendship leaves Scotty with noclaims. Into this mess blunders Madigan, looking for something that Scotty has long ago trainedherself not to give.

  Postcards from Surfers

  Late in the afternoon my mother and Auntie Lorna and I walk along the beach to Surfers. The tide is out: our bare feet scarcely mark the firm sand. Their two voices run on, one high, one low. If I speak they pretend to listen, just as I feign attention to their endless, looping discourses: these are our courtesies: this is love. Everything is spoken, nothing is said.

  From one of Australia’s most celebrated writers come eleven stories about the complexities of life and love; of looking back and longing; of what it means to be a stranger, on foreign ground and known, told with the piercing familiarity and resonance we have come to expect from Helen Garner. Remarkably honest, often very funny and always woven in ways that surprise, these stories tease out everyday life to show the darkness underneath – but also the possibilities of joy.

  ‘She glories in the ordinary and makes it glow’

  Adelaide Advertiser