True Stories

by Helen Garner

  He moved along the carriage between the passengers’ outstretched legs, not proffering the little basket, just carrying it near his waist with both hands. He was surfing down the car on the wave of his own voice. People gazed up at him while they burrowed in their pockets and bags. When he broke into ‘Hooked on a Feeling’, a white boy sprang up and joined in; the beggar beamed and hi-fived him. The whole motley crowd of us burst out laughing. Any minute now, we would all get to our feet and start dancing and twirling and clapping our hands. Money flew through the air.

  It seems so unfair. What does it mean? That even so low on the ladder of fortune, charm and sweetness of nature are rewarded? Or does it illustrate that unbearable remark from the Bible, which preachers have such a hard time explaining: ‘To him that hath it shall be given, and from him that hath not it shall be taken away’?

  1994

  Marriage

  AT THE OLD Royal Mint in Melbourne, where civil marriages are celebrated, it is hard to be an inconspicuous observer, for many of the wedding parties are small, some no bigger than four all told, and although I take my place at the very back of the huge Victorian room, wearing what I hope is an unobtrusive black suit, I can’t help worrying that my spectre will show up in the background of the photos, a small grim figure with a notebook and a cold. Who was that woman? I feel I have turned into the Fairy Blackstick herself: sceptical, ironic, but still I hope, benevolent.

  There’s a cold wind and a weak sun on this Saturday morning. The Mint car park has savage little square speed-humps, and the building is still shut tight at nine o’clock. The pretty garden at the back has a sign that says, ‘No confetti to be thrown in or outside this building’. The plane trees do not observe man-made rules and are letting their big claw-like leaves lie about all over the grass. Round and round the building I roam, keeping my hands inside my cuffs, looking for an open door. One has an unfortunate sign, which must have occasioned its share of manly jocularity: ‘Please enter: Sentencing Committee’. I peep through a window into an office. Some wag has tacked up a poster saying, ‘Cows may come and cows may go but the BULL in this place goes on forever!’

  Nobody around. I lean over the stone wall and find myself looking down on Little Lonsdale Street. I see a couple emerge from the front door of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute opposite. The young woman has a white dressing over one eye. Her husband is leading her by the hand. She is wearing a parka: her arms are not in the sleeves but the hood is on her head. She is weakened, stepping feebly. Her mouth is set in a line. Soberly he opens the back door of the car and helps her in. All this is done without a word or a glance passing between them: they have been here before. In sickness and in health. They drive away. Two parking officers chalk the tyre of the Alsco Linen van parked in front of the hospital.

  The Mint doors have opened. The first wedding party has arrived, and is gathering its forces in the lobby. A little boy cranes his neck at the ceiling. ‘How hoi is it?’ he asks. His mother doesn’t answer. She is a beefy woman in a synthetic dress and high-heeled ankle-strap sandals. She is getting her camera ready for the bride. The boy, bored, trots off to the splendid staircase and scales the ornate banister. ‘Giddown off there,’ says his mother without looking up, ‘or I’ll smack you down.’

  Ah! the bride. Her tender face. Her name is Kerry and she is marrying a man called Sergio. She and her attendants are carrying ethereal little bouquets. She gives instructions in a quiet, pleasant voice. They are waiting for the men. A few children cluster round the bride, getting in the way of the photographers of both families. ‘Now can we have this little devil out of the way?’ says another strapping member of the sylph-like Kerry’s family, smiling through clenched teeth.

  How short a civil ceremony is! The celebrant, a Maltese Australian with serious eyes, a sweet expression, and the faint remnants of an accent, does his best to make it warm: he manages to utter formal phrases like ‘solemn and binding nature’ and ‘by being in a prohibited relationship’ as if they were drawn from the vernacular.

  Australians are not much good at ceremonial behaviour. We have no public graces. An event seems to be that which a camera may record. There must be half a dozen of the big photographers now, galumphing about in their unsafe shoes, snapping from this angle and that, bridling and whinnying.

  Sergio’s grandparents sit quietly on their chairs.

  The best man has a plain, naughty face: he is curly-headed and cheerful, with a mobile mouth and lively eyes, the kind of man who has looked like a grown-up since he was ten. He keeps wanting to laugh out of sheer high spirits. He grins and nods at everyone, including the Fairy Blackstick, who mentally crosses him off her hit list.

  The high room echoes, even to the shy voices of Kerry and Sergio as they make each other vows which, on paper, are so breathtaking in their solemnity and import that if any of those present should turn their full attention to what is being so lightly promised, they might be unable to hold back a cry of warning.

  But it’s done, and now the kissing starts. Kerry has been around Italians long enough to pick up the habit of kissing on both cheeks. She is flushed and charming. Sergio wipes a cousin’s lipstick off his face, turns to one of his large female in-laws and asks, ‘What’ appened to Kev’s van?’

  There is nothing worse than a wedding for bringing witnesses out in a rash of sentimentality. Even crabby old Fairy Blackstick in the back row gets a lump in her throat, ten times for the ten marriages. What struggles have the protagonists gone through to arrive at this point? And what further battles lie ahead of them?

  Some have made the booking and don’t turn up. Today it’s a real estate agent and a boutique manageress, both divorced and living at the same address. Was it a whim half acted upon? ‘Looks like a no-show,’ says the celebrant. ‘Actually you’d be surprised at the number of couples who put the same address on the documents.’ This is the way the world is going—at least for people who marry at the registry office.

  Some couples (though none today) shock even the celebrant with the inappropriateness of their union. ‘I remember one couple,’ he says, ‘or rather, I’ll never forget them. The lady was beautiful, but the man was an absolute pig.’

  ‘On Saturdays,’ says the official Mint photographer, ‘they’re usually pretty good. But during the week you get all kinds. No shoes. One goes this way afterwards, the other goes that way. All kinds. But it’s improving.’

  Once the thrill of watching strangers sign their lives away has worn off, there remains the feast of tiny human dramas available to any idler in a public place.

  A divorced woman remarries, with her small daughters behind her. The woman’s face is as stiff as a schoolgirl’s with shyness and nerves. She is wearing a really chic suit; pinned in her hair is a piece of pink fluff like what comes in a box with an Easter egg, and she has fixed to her lapel a dashing little twist of net, as if to symbolise the veil she wore the first time round. When she turns and smiles at her girls, she screws up her face and sticks out her tongue as embarrassed children do. The girls, in tartan and pearls, try to sing ‘Here Comes the Bride’, but nobody joins in and they fade out after the first few notes. A relative takes a picture. The girls stand cheerfully in front: ‘Bob down! Bob down!’ cries the photographer.

  The drama of the exchange of rings is often dissolved in the comedy of having to push hard to get them over the knuckle.

  Two Uruguayans. Their names are fabulously, polysyllabically, mythologically beautiful. The room is suddenly warm and noisy, overflowing with handsome women in jewellery and furs and heartbreaking young men in bomber jackets, one of whom sidles up to the celebrant and says to him in a stage whisper, ‘Listen—lock the door, or he’ll run away.’

  Two Australian divorcees, both getting on for forty. The man keeps looking round with a goofy grin. He gets through his statement with difficulty, then turns to his friends and says, ‘Phew!’

  Equality of the sexes has entered even the wording of the marriage vow: ‘m
an and wife’ has become ‘husband and wife’, and there is no talk of anyone having to obey anyone else. But a peculiar rite persists: the institution of The Kiss. ‘John, you may now kiss the bride.’ It is usually the signal (among Australians, anyway) for a burst of awkward merriment, of adolescent guffaws and even of risque comments sotto voce. I’m sorry, but it’s the men who show this extraordinary reaction. When you think about it, though, to kiss in public, to join mouths, is an astonishingly intimate thing to do. And to do it again, at the request of the inevitable slow-thinking photographer— oh là là!

  A young German, tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in a subtly coloured jacket and leather trousers, repeats the statement after the celebrant: his accent does something strange to the words, and as he says ‘to be my luffly wedded wife’ he stares at her as if he can’t really believe that this is what he is required to say. They kiss. ‘That’s enough,’ says a man’s voice from the crowd.

  A bloke with a stud in one ear marries a woman in a crown of flowers. When he kisses her there is a laugh then one or two claps…a pause…then a boy in the back row, wearing ripple-soled suede shoes, calls out, ‘Yay!’ and they all applaud. The groom turns round and opens his arms to his friends. ‘OK, folks!’ he cries. ‘Let’s pardy!’

  And now two Asian students approach the desk. They look alarmingly young. Can this be wise? They have no wedding party, only an Australian couple in their sixties, the woman in a great deal of pancake and blusher and a lairy fur jacket. Is she his landlady? She seems fond of the young man, who says to the celebrant as he stumbles over the pronunciations, ‘I use Shane as my Christian name.’

  ‘Just marry them,’ says the landlady, ‘before they change their minds.’

  Shane’s knees are making fast little rhythmic jerks inside his neat trousers. From my angle I can see the bride’s chubby cheekbones go up and out, again and again, as she smiles and giggles. Shane kisses her enthusiastically, before he is told he may. Everyone laughs. While the landlady and her friend sign the papers, the new couple compare their rings and giggle.

  The landlady’s friend, a punter in a snap-brim hat, does his level best to make conversation in the awkward pause that follows the formalities. ‘You’re from Sarawak, are you?’ he says.

  Shane nods, looking eager.

  ‘It’s on the other side—of—um—Borneo, isn’t it. I was at Labuan. During the war. It’s off the coast of Borneo. Near Brunei.’

  ‘Course,’ says the landlady, wanting to keep the conversation on marriage, ‘during the war a lot of Australian girls wanted to marry American soldiers. Before they could leave the country.’ She gives a shrill laugh.

  Shane and the bride, puzzled, nod and nod, never losing their eager smiles. They all shuffle towards the door, with the celebrant in attendance. The jollifications of the next wedding party can be heard in the hall outside. The Fairy Blackstick can’t bear the tension. I step forward to open the heavy door for them, but they see me coming and think I work here, that I’m part of the deal: they welcome my approach with beaming smiles, and put out their hands to shake mine. The celebrant, a really nice man, is grinning at me from behind the ill-assorted four. We shake hands all round and I say, keeping my notebook behind my back, ‘Congratulations! I hope you’ll be very happy!’

  ‘Thank you!’ they say.

  I open the door, I wave goodbye, I wish them luck, and I mean it!—I do! I do!

  1986

  Death

  WITH A BURIAL, what you see is what you get. Body in box, box in hole, earth on top. Jews understand the worth of a real burial—not just a few symbolic clods and walk away, but mourners pass the shovel from hand to hand, fill the hole right to the top, cry out loud while the job is done slowly and with physical effort; and who can fail then to feel the grave as a bed, a fine and private place, into which the dead one has been tenderly laid, then covered as a child is tucked in under blankets, and left to sleep?

  With a cremation you get a curtain drawn between the weeping and the fate of the body. People must have wanted this at some stage, or it wouldn’t be the industry it is. But isn’t there a curiosity we feel is morbid, a longing to know what happens to the coffin after it clunks down and out of sight? What weird ideas do we brood on? I told a friend of mine—in her forties, intelligent, worldly, witty, who’s held my hand at more than one funeral—that I’d spent a day at Melbourne’s Springvale crematorium.

  ‘Oh, don’t tell me,’ she said with a shiver. ‘They cut the body up into pieces, don’t they.’

  ‘Oh no!’ I said, astonished. I told her what I’d seen. She listened. When I’d finished she gave a sigh.

  ‘What you said makes me feel better,’ she said.

  The funny thing is that anyone could go out there and find out what they want to know.

  ‘You can look at anything you like here,’ says the manager.

  ‘Otherwise you get the hidden mysteries.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The mysteries. The unknown.’

  He shows me the layout of the place—the huge garden, the four chapels, the furnace room—then goes back to his office and leaves me to my own devices. This surprises me: I’d expected to be kept under surveillance and given a laundered view of events. I feel like a kid suddenly given more freedom that it knows what to do with. I know what I really want to see, but I am embarrassed by my curiosity which I still cannot help feeling is morbid, so I go for a long walk round the garden, through the enormous cemetery.

  It is a cool, sparkling morning. A couple of the gardeners, full-blown eccentrics with unidentifiable European accents, corner me and bash my ear. One of them tells me a long and comical story with actions.

  ‘One day I was raking,’ he says. ‘Like this. And I saw on the ground, just near the tap, a black handbag. It had an address, a hundred and seventy-five dollars and a pension cheque. I took it to the boss. Other blokes they say, Eddy, why didn’t you take the money and dig the bag into the garden? No one will know. I say, No, honesty is the best thing in this world. There is no honesty in this world.

  ‘Some time later she comes out, a lady, she says to me, Are you Eddy? I say, Lady, I am Eddy but I don’t know you. She says, You found my handbag. She gives me an envelope. I start to walk away, I say, Lady, I don’t need anything. I don’t need your envelope. But she runs after me—and she’s not young—fifty-eight or sixty—and she sticks the envelope in my back pocket, here, this one—I didn’t even feel it go in, I was walking away. But later I find it in my pocket, and there’s five dollars in it.’

  His colleague, a freckled man in a towelling hat, wheeling a barrow and whistling with expert trills, shows me a little area where the gravestones are decorated with artistic and fanciful sculptures. He is content to draw my attention to them but Eddy hurries up to interpret them for me.

  ‘Some people spend seventeen thousand dollars on a memorial. See? This is all bronze. They come out and put a kind of wox—a yelly—on it. See this? This is the Mona Lisa. See the little dove on her hand? And what do you reckon this means? A river? Course it’s not a river! It means—the ocean! Crossing the ocean.

  ‘And these? Yes! It’s a choir of angels! You look at it from over there. Makes a nice effect, don’t you think? One day someone came out and put a lighted cigarette in their mouths. It dropped—see these marks? Tsk tsk. Oh, she was wild.’

  This is highly entertaining but not what I have come for. I find myself drawn back towards the chapels and to the furnaces: where the action is. The first funerals have begun and I stand at the back of one of the chapels listening to the limp-backed tributes that are being paid by a minister to a man he never met. We have to get paid functionaries to do even our speaking for us. What a pathetic, stiff, frightened lot we are.

  I go outside and loiter between the chapels in the sun. I am longing to go back to the furnace room but I’m scared. Scared of what? Not of what I’ll see, but of what people will think. What people? I don’t know. Anyone who sees me. They�
��ll think I’ve got a sick mind. They’ll think…

  I am saved from this nonsense by a man from the furnace room, to whom the manager introduced me an hour ago before the fires had been lit. He’s wearing his uniform of maroon blazer and grey trousers, but on his feet are Frye boots and his hands are tattooed. He sees me dawdling with intent, strides up to me and gets straight to the point. ‘Do you want to come and have another look?’

  He takes me through a little door marked ‘Private’.

  Oddly, this is the most shocking moment of the day, this one quick step from the outside world of colour—sun and leaves—into the monochrome of the furnace room. I panic, my legs go weak, I think, It’s the gas chambers, it’s the underworld, I can’t write this, only a photographer could show this place as it is, it’s made of dust, there’s no blood, everything’s a shade of pale grey, the huge ovens are grey, the walls and floor are grey, the workers are grey, the air is grey. I’m not going to faint but I’m going to lose control of my bowels.

  This does not happen. The shock lasts two seconds and passes, and I see I am in a long cement-coloured area that must link the business ends of the four chapels which are built in pairs, back to back. Men are walking about. There is a low roaring sound.

  My guide gives me a sharp look. ‘You don’t mind seeing the actual…umm…’ ‘No! That’s what I’m here for.’

  He nods, and leads me to the end furnace. I think they call them cremators in the official brochures, but a furnace is what it is, huge, wide and tall, like a giant pizza oven.

  My guide opens a door, like the door of an old fuel stove, only bigger, and I bend over to look in. First, with relief, I see colour, the only colour in the place—orange flames—and then the small end of a coffin. The heat is so tremendous that everything wavers: the coffin is covered with a network of fine cracks, its surface reminds me of an old porcelain jug in an op shop, with a glaze that’s covered in lines while the china’s still in one piece underneath.