by Helen Garner
‘Mum!’
But she’s just sitting there, unperturbed, looking down at her purple wrist. The empty room is as plain as a Hopper painting. Tall windows let in slanting rectangles of sun. She looks up with a social smile.
‘Fancy seeing you here! Do you live far? Didn’t you once live in Kew?’
‘No, Mum. That’s Marie. I lived in Fitzroy, don’t you –’ Just in time I bite off ‘remember’, the word that makes her face stiffen and go blank.
I sit beside her and show her a photo of her new great-grand-daughter. She holds it by one corner.
‘Do I just look at it,’ she asks, perplexed, ‘or do I have to make a decision?’
Where the hell is my nephew? How will he find us? Mum keeps glancing at her appointment card: she can’t figure out what it’s doing in her hand. Her X-rays come and I speed her down to join the queue at the Fracture Clinic. Behind her wheelchair sits a normal old lady, knitting with the nonchalant brilliance Mum once had. What if Mum turns round and sees her? What if she breaks down in despair at everything she’s lost?
Then out of the lift steps the nephew in his baggy clothes, hauling a heavy backpack. Sorrow softens at his approach. He kisses each of us, looking into our faces with his squinty-eyed smile. We settle in for the long wait. He pulls out a sheaf of drawing paper. But all his pencils are blunt.
‘Run down to the ground floor shop,’ I say, ‘and buy a new pack.’
He bites his lip.
‘OK then – you stay here with Grandma and I’ll go.’
He darts his eyes left and right.
‘What?’
He leans in to me and whispers, ‘I don’t like blood.’
‘It’s only fractures here,’ I say, ‘not open wounds.’
He gulps and nods.
When I canter back, bearing a packet of textas and three small KitKats, the boy and his grandmother are sitting side by side, intent on the parade of casts and crutches and wheelchairs. I break out the chocolate bars.
‘What do they call this?’ says Mum. ‘KitKat? They used to be very popular, didn’t they? I haven’t seen one of these in donkey’s years. Have I got chocolate round my mouth? Ooh, it’s donkey’s years since I . . .’
The nephew spreads out his art equipment on a low table and starts work. I examine the set of textas. Something’s missing. There’s no blue. I explode in irritation. ‘How can they not have a blue texta in a set, for God’s sake?’
‘No – it’s all right,’ explains the nephew gently. ‘You use the purple, and then you put the white on top of it – see?’
‘But that’s – brilliant!’
‘I know,’ he says. ‘I love these textas.’
The cartoon he is creating concerns an adventurous lad who buys a meat pie and sets out on a long sea voyage. Breathing heavily through his nose, he lays down areas of purple and white in smooth diagonal strokes. I am permitted to sketch and colour-in a palm tree.
A young man with a row of metal spikes poking out of his shin draws up his wheelchair next to Mum’s and in a low, dramatic voice begins to confide in her.
‘I come off me motorbike,’ he says. ‘A Commodore went through a red light. I was hit –’ (he pauses) ‘– by a tonne and a half of steel.’
Mum gazes at him without speaking. He seems content with her response.
Hours pass. Pie Boy swims to a tropical isle and meets a hermit. I find an apple in my bag and we hack it into chunks with the paper scissors. Mum devours her share. She has no idea that she’s broken her arm, or why we’re here.
At last she is called. The doctor glances at her X-rays. ‘Good. Come back in three weeks.’
A whole morning – for this?
By noon I’ve got her back to the nursing home, and installed her at the lunch table. Now – how on earth do I entertain a nine-year-old boy for the rest of the day? On the tram I start gabbling about video games.
The nephew sighs. ‘Look – if you don’t mind,’ he says, ‘I’d rather finish Pie Boy. Can’t we just go back to your place and sit at the kitchen table? We could put on some classical music.’
He rests his head on my shoulder. I take my first deep breath of the day. His chunky arm leans against mine, warming me.
‘Actually,’ I say, ‘I had fun at the Fracture Clinic.’
‘Same,’ says the nephew.
He is holding Pie Boy carefully on his lap. Our tram goes streaming along St Kilda Road towards the city.
At Freedom
What I want is a round table to eat off. Since Mum got sick, our father lives alone in the middle of the city. I don’t like to think of him not knowing what to do after breakfast when he finishes the crossword. So I phone him to see if he wants to come with me to Freedom Furniture in Chapel Street. He sounds keen – says he’ll go downstairs and wait in the lobby.
A fine Friday morning! I jump in the car and fly down Mt Alexander Road. Everything goes swimmingly till I turn right off Queensberry into Rathdowne and come up against a slow-moving line of cars. As I inch along beside the Exhibition Gardens, glancing back to see if the big pittosporums have broken into bloom (not yet), I notice that drivers are hesitating, confused, changing lanes on a whim.
On Victoria Parade there’s a sign: MAJOR PUBLIC EVENT: TAKE ALTERNATIVE ROUTE. Oh no! It’s Grand Final Eve. They’re clearing the city for the big parade. Flustered, I hang a left and a right, and get boxed up in one of the mazes of No Right Turns that plague this city. Dad will be pacing the lobby in his viyella shirt and wool pants, tapping his foot, clicking his tongue and looking at his watch.
When I make it to the door of his building, however, I find not a cranky patriarch but an old gent exchanging charming small talk with a female neighbour. Bidding her farewell he strolls grandly out into the sun.
Eager footy fans in their colours are bustling up Collins Street.
‘Gawd,’ says Dad. ‘All this nonsense, just for the flaming football.’
‘I like it,’ I say.
He glances at me curiously. ‘Do you?’
‘And,’ I say, becoming reckless, ‘I liked the Olympic torch too.’
‘You liked that?’
‘It’s a celebration. I like a celebration.’
He gives a sceptical laugh. ‘Nah – it’s all bullshit. Couldn’t you find a closer park?’
Furniture stores are among life’s consolations. I love their fantasy ‘rooms’, those tiny, peaceful settlements that segue in and out of each other. Today for a change I actually plan to buy something, but as soon as we cross the river and enter Freedom I realise (a) that all the good tables are rectangular, and (b) that my father is totally the wrong person to have brought. Browsing is a pleasure unknown to him. Within five minutes he’s bored and restless.
‘A round table you want? What’s wrong with that one there?’
‘But Dad. It’s an outdoor one.’
‘What? How can you tell?’
‘It’s got an umbrella sticking up out of it!’
‘You can take it out.’
‘Yes but that’d leave a hole right in the middle.’
‘You could plug it. Put a tablecloth over it.’
I stare at him. We start to laugh.
We approach a teenaged attendant draped across a cash register. He greets us cheerfully: ‘Hi, guys!’
‘Got any round dining tables?’
He flips through the catalogue and comes up with a couple of silly-looking glass-topped things.
Dad heaves a sigh of irritation and turns away. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’
Once I would have lost my temper, made a scene and sulked for weeks. Today it takes me four seconds to grasp and accept the blindingly obvious: the outing has been a mistake. It’s irredeemable. With a strange relief I follow Dad to the door.
‘Bye, guys!’ chirps the attendant.
We speed back across the river. I know the way blindfold but Dad issues instructions. ‘Take the left lane. Gawd, why didn’t you take the left lane?’
<
br /> Spring Street at Flinders is blocked for the parade. Cars in front of us are peeling off in desperate U-turns.
‘Keep going!’ says Dad. ‘We must get through! I’ll say I’m old! I can’t walk that far! I live in this street!’
But I turn back and take a detour between the Treasury and the budding Fitzroy Gardens, round by St Patrick’s Cathedral. The sun’s shining. There are police everywhere.
‘Let me out here,’ says Dad behind Parliament House, and strides off with hardly a backward look.
I pause for a crocodile of small kids in Essendon scarves who are being ushered across the road by their teachers. If I have a team it’s the Bulldogs: I don’t care about Essendon or Melbourne. But for a moment, on the quiet road behind the Parliament, where elms are about to burst into leaf and people are hurrying on foot to the parade, the city feels like a special, mythical ‘land’, where citizens are decent to each other, and time slows down, and young heroes will be borne along the streets in glory, and everybody will rejoice together.
The forecast wind springs up. As I curve northwest past the university, the two giant eucalypts on the roundabout are flowing and twinkling in the stream of air. I haven’t achieved what I set out to do, but only a fool would say that the morning has been wasted.
Auntie’s Clean Bed
The baby crashes out in her cot and isn’t heard from again all evening. Active babysitting is not required. The nanna is spreading out the newspaper among the ruins of dinner when the sister of the baby’s father drifts in the front door, looking for a place to stay the night. The nanna gets the vodka out of the freezer. They clear the table with swipes of the forearm, and sit down to toast each other’s . . . well, what are they drinking to tonight, these two women from opposite sides of the baby’s family? Each other’s health, of course – but also to something else they have in common: problems with men.
The nanna, who is old enough to be the auntie’s mother, contemplates her dark, rather powerful beauty, which is not compromised by the fact that her eyelids are swollen from crying. The auntie sketches out her situation, quietly and without bitchiness. Everything she says is painfully imbued with her respect and love for the man in question.
To the nanna, recently divorced for the third time, the story unrolls against a complex backdrop of memories. In its difficult events the nanna recognises the pattern of each of her marriages. In the actions, or non-actions, of the man, she sees all the men she has ever loved. In the desperate self-abnegations of the woman, she hears her own history and that of virtually every woman she has ever known. There is nothing new here. It’s the story of men and women down the ages. And yet the auntie in her turn must live it out, suffer it as if it were freshly minted in the workshop of the gods.
This is one of the few times in the nanna’s life that she has had no urge to curse the man, to say, ‘Don’t break your heart over that jerk. He’s not worth it.’ She knows him. He’s not that sort of man.
‘The first day I went to his place,’ says the auntie, heaving a sigh and topping up the shot glasses, ‘I noticed he had a good set of knives in the kitchen. That’s number one on the list of things a girl wants to see in a bloke’s house when she goes there for the first time.’
‘What are the others?’ says the nanna, getting out her notebook. ‘Let’s make a list.’
‘A guitar?’ suggests the auntie. ‘Wait. Rule a line down the middle. On the other side put the things you don’t want to see.’
‘OK. What’s the opposite of a guitar?’
‘A drum kit,’ says the auntie, ‘and the opposite of good knives is a whole lot of empty pizza boxes.’
‘Is a dog good?’
‘Yes,’ says the auntie.
‘What’s the opposite of a dog?’
‘Five dogs.’
‘Clean sheets?’
‘The opposite of that is a single doona on a double bed.’
‘There are guys,’ says the nanna, scribbling away, ‘who will usher you into a room with nothing in it but a narrow foam strip on the floor. And a bare bulb blazing on a wire.’
The auntie is a modern girl and has probably seen much worse, but lets it pass. ‘Certificate of title is good,’ she says.
‘And the opposite?’
‘Flatmates from school. Chooks are good. The opposite is rats. A collection of stubby holders is bad. And put bong on the bad side. Bong on a coffee table, that is. I don’t mind a bong if it’s sort of hidden.’
The auntie insists that she’s not hungry, but when the nanna heats up some soup and makes toast, she wolfs the lot.
‘Thanks,’ says the auntie, pushing the empty bowl away. ‘Now let’s go and look at the baby.’
They creep into the bedroom. It’s dim in there but they can just make out, halfway down the cot, the histrionically outflung arms, the cannonball head. They cover their mouths to muffle snorts of laughter. So still! The nanna puts her face right in close. Yes, a tiny aura of warmth.
In the spare room, under the ceiling light, the futon is a tangled mess.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ says the auntie, forlorn again. ‘I’ll sleep in it like that.’
‘Don’t be such a stoic,’ says the nanna briskly. ‘You’re sad. You need a bit of luxury. Stand back.’
She finds in the cupboard a clean flannelette sheet, plumps the doona to a cloud, stuffs the pillow into a new case and positions it right in the centre. Downstairs the front door bangs. Somebody calls out, ‘Hullo?’ They’re home.
The baby’s mother comes in, smelling of party smoke and carrying a bedside lamp. She plugs it in and flicks off the top light. The room softens. The auntie gazes at the fresh bed as a parched traveller might contemplate a reed-fringed pool. A clean and private place to sleep. That’s the basic requirement. Everything else starts from there.
Have Respect
On a perfumed noon in spring, day two of the World Economic Forum, I hear hoarse shouting from inside my suburban railway station as I stroll up the ramp. Three young blokes come brawling backwards off the platform and crash, yelling and cursing, into the wall of the boarded-up ticket office. I spot a bandanna, a thin white face, loose track pants. Oh, hell. Junkies. I’ve got a date in the city. Too late to take the tram. I put my ticket in the machine.
There are nine blokes, in a tight mass, further along the platform. No one else in sight. Should I bolt? It takes me three seconds to see that they are having way too much fun to be junkies. They’re young, barely fifteen, ethnically various – Middle Eastern, Greek, Indian – and, except for one southeast Asian boy with an elegant haircut, who loops around the edges of the gang in a fastidious glide, they’re all drunk. They are staggering and swaying about, buffeting and jostling and roaring.
My first urge is to efface myself, to move down to the other end of the platform. Then I think, Bugger them. Why should I? I pull Who Weekly out of my bag and take up a position in the sun, a couple of metres away from them.
They are very drunk. They are draping themselves on each other, falling about flamboyantly – and they are also, I realise, in love with each other, in the uninhibited bliss of youth. Right on cue, the white-faced boy in the bandanna yells in a shrill, excited voice, ‘Let’s go poofter-bashing, hey? Poofter-bashing?’ The other boys, stumbling and grinning, ignore him. He shouts louder, ‘First junkie I see today I’m gunna bash, roight?’
Out of the mêlée rises a lone voice of conscience. ‘Hey gois? Gois? Have respect! There’s a lady here! Have respect, man! Hey Meess! Meess?’
No one has called me Miss since 1972 at Fitzroy High. He lurches up to me, a soft-faced boy with melting eyes and an incipient moustache. His eyebrows form an inverted V of earnestness. A cigarette burns between his amateurish fingers.
‘ ’Scuse me, Meess. I can control my drunkenness. But if you don’t like it, I’ll shut them up. Those kids’ve drunk three bottles of Jim Beam.’
The southeast Asian boy catches my eye, glances critically at his companions, the
n bares his teeth and draws a finger across his throat.
‘How come you’re all drunk at this early hour?’ I ask primly.
Whitey in the bandanna teeters past on an angle. So young, to look so mean! I can’t hide a grin. His hard expression cracks into a smile of boyish sweetness. Blushing, he skulks away to the cyclone-wire fence.
‘Where you goeen’, Meess?’ asks my chivalrous friend, sprawling on the bench. ‘To the ceety? We’re goeen’ to the, uhm, protest, you know? Down at the casino?’
‘Watch out you don’t get your heads kicked in,’ I say.
He gives a daring shrug. ‘Where are you goeen’, Meess?’
‘I’m taking my mum and dad out to lunch.’
His jaw drops. ‘Your parents? They must be really old!’
‘Sure, they’re old – but not that old!’
‘But you look old!’
‘How old do you think I am?’
He broods on it. ‘Seventy-two?’
My smile fades. I make a lowering gesture with my flat hand.
‘Sixty?’ hazards an Indian boy, sensing dimly that his mate has dropped a clanger.
I lower my hand a fraction and wiggle it.
‘Uhmmmm . . . fifty-three?’
‘Fifty-seven,’ I say.
They nod. My tactless chevalier gazes genially up at me. ‘That’s nice, Meess. You’re takeen’ your parents out. That’s good.’
The brawling breaks out again. Foul words fly. ‘Have respect!’ he shouts over his shoulder. ‘We won’t get violent,’ he says to me, one hand out in a soothing gesture.
‘I’m not scared of you,’ I say.
He looks confused. The train pulls in. I head for the front carriage and they pour themselves into the last one, bellowing in a perfunctory and unconvincing manner, ‘The workers! United! Will never be defeated!’
I get out at Parliament and pause on the platform, wanting a last glimpse of them as they pass, but the windows show only calm, well-mannered passengers reading in rows. They must have got off at Central. Later I scan the TV news footage for them, in vain. I liked them. I keep thinking of them, wondering if they got as far as the casino where the riots happened, or whether their fleeting attention was snagged en route by some other form of violence, or whatever it was they were looking for.