It took me over an hour to get to St. Kilda. It’s a beach suburb. Once it was grand, with lots of old fancy apartment buildings with swirly columns and bay windows. Then it went under and the immigrants moved in and opened cake shops, and artists moved in since it was cheap. Now there are lots of places selling sex, and there’s housing for hobos, and great old crumbling white hotels with dirty carpets where you can see punk bands. When we were kids we sometimes went ice skating there at St. Moritz, but the whole rink got burned down and they’re going to build a hotel there instead.
The best thing about St. Kilda is the mad face at Luna Park. The mouth is open and that’s what you walk through. The eyes are wide and frenzied and there is a row of colored lightbulbs and the lips are bared so you can see teeth. So it’s crazed, but also old and rickety, fenced in by the shaky wood lattice of the roller coaster. It looms, leers, and creaks there in the center of St. Kilda, like a resident ghost, like a memory from a past that won’t go away and won’t come forward either. It’s like the corner of your mind that itches, the small madness that you live with simply because it won’t go away. You cover it in new clothes, you cage it up inside your strong chest, but still, it is there.
I went to the beach. I locked up my bike and went and sat on the beach. The sand was white and puckered and full of puddles of sun and cigarette stubs. There was a German couple sitting next to me on a bench. They had sensible sandals on, and money belts. The German woman had an unfortunate face. Unfortunate because it wasn’t the kind of face that you’d want to wake up next to. It might make you feel as if you were being examined for some untidiness, studded, as it was, with poky eyes. I felt bad for having such a mean thought, so I smiled kindly at the couple. They received my smile with an awkward uncertainty.
To tell you the truth, I wasn’t feeling that good. Not as good as I was meant to be feeling. Not how I’d planned to feel. At least that German couple, bad mornings or not, had each other. Most people were sitting in clumps or strolling along in pairs. They were together.
When no one understands you, you go to great lengths to understand yourself. You have conversations, inward ones. Only problem is, the person I talk to inside my head is very mean. What the mean person said right then was: Do you ever see yourself in the mirror and think you are the ugliest person in the world? I nodded, and banged the sand out flat with the palm of my hand. I certainly wasn’t a very pretty person. Mean Person was always reminding me of things like that, always saying: See, you’re so hopeless. Now look how selfish you are. Or, Boy, you’re a bad kind of fish. Sometimes I imagined what a kind person would say, but the thing was, you couldn’t believe it since you knew it would just be fake reassurances, patting your leg, not discriminating. And if there was a wise person, well, she was very reclusive. So that left Mean Person hogging the conversations. It was Mean Person who was responsible for me having mean thoughts about German tourists. It wasn’t me.
I stared out at the sea. A small ship crawled along the horizon. I lay back and closed my eyes.
The day of the funeral, Dad and I went to see Harry in the hospital. Mum wouldn’t come. I would have preferred to go alone, but I couldn’t tell them that. Harry lay on a bed covered in a white sheet. He was behind a gray screen that crinkled in and out like an accordion. He had tubes coming out of his nose and wrist. His left eye was just a slit surrounded by purple puffed-up skin. There was a bandage around his jaw. He was staring at the ceiling when we came in. His head turned toward us. He didn’t smile. His busted-up face was full of sadness. Dad and I were all dressed up for the funeral. Dad’s tie was crooked. I was wearing Mum’s flared skirt with a shirt tucked in. None of us looked like we normally looked. Harry, all hurt, flattened, bare brave arms pinned down by tubes; us, formal and dark and stiff. We stood there; he lay there. Tears rolled down his face. I’d never seen him look like that before. I’d never seen him crushed by anything.
“You all right, Harry?” said Dad.
Harry nodded and I went close to the bed. Harry’s slopey eyes followed me. I took his hand and Dad put his arm around me and we all had tears dribbling down our faces and no one could say anything that those dribbling tears weren’t already saying. We were all feeling, not for ourselves, but for each other, because someone else’s pain is so very hard to take, even harder than your own. It was as if we made a circle, the three of us, and inside the circle, sadness welled up and ebbed between us like an echo in a cave. Our hearts linked up, like injured arms holding together against a huge, unstoppable tide. They held a place to pour into.
“What do they say’s wrong with you, Harry?” said my dad. Harry shifted as if he had to locate that part of himself.
“Mainly internal damage. Crushed ribs, punctured spleen.”
“Are you in pain?” I asked.
“I’m all right,” he said, but I could tell it was painful. I looked at his wrist, the white skin.
It was hard to locate the other feelings I’d had for Harry, the love feelings. It was like trying to remember a tune when you’d become deaf. A sudden rip in time had happened and there was a then and there was a now, and they’d been wrenched so far apart I couldn’t make the two meet up. Anyway, I told myself there was only so much feeling you could do all at once, and love and grief were both about the biggest things you could feel, and the two just couldn’t fit in one small body at the same time, so love would have to wait.
I didn’t go back to see Harry in the hospital, though. It was too hard and sad and strained, and I couldn’t go through it. I didn’t see him again, not until he got out.
chapter twenty-two
I must have drifted off to sleep on the beach. When I woke up it was late in the afternoon. I’d had a bad dream about an injured bird. I’d rushed around holding it, asking the people in clumps and pairs on the beach to help me save the bird. But no one would.
I got up, brushed the sand off my cheek, and went in search of food.
Je suis un clapot, je suis un clapot. I was making it a little tune in my head. I am a toad, I am a toad. It didn’t sound the same in English. Clapot wasn’t a real word. It came from me mispronouncing the French word for toad when I was a kid, and Eddie ran with it. I liked the word, liked the shape of it coming out of my mouth. It became a secret insult Eddie and I slung at each other. T’es un clapot, toi! I would whisper at him (if I was feeling very French). Or he’d just yell it out at me, if he saw me at school or walking home. Hey, Clapot!
Whenever I felt bad about something, I said to myself, “But I’m lucky I’m me and not Diedre Disaster.” Diedre was a girl at school whose legs were so white you could see the veins zigzagging behind the skin. It was a crime to have legs that white. So it would have been bad to have been Diedre. I said it quietly so that God wouldn’t hear. I had a feeling it wasn’t a generous sentiment. I said it then, but already it seemed to have lost its effect. After all, I couldn’t be sure anymore that it might not have been better to be Diedre Disaster. Maybe she never lost anyone, maybe she was about to find her thing: She would blossom, marry a furniture-maker with kind hands, roast a chicken, and live in an honest white house on Hope Street.
I wandered into a music shop. I thought I’d get a present for Ivy. A Fats Waller record or Louis Armstrong or something old-time and happy. I went up to the counter and waited while the boy behind it served someone else. He was a tall boy with funny peaked eyebrows and hair that stood out at different angles. The girl he was serving was young and stood like a shrub, quiet and spreading and needing sunlight. She had soft white cheeks, a moon face, and a lot of black clothes that wafted around her like a storm cloud. She looked up at him with her eyes but not her face; she kept her face looking down. He slid the record over the counter in a brown paper bag with the receipt lying on top. She stood still a moment then pulled the record out of the bag and pushed it back toward him.
“Could you sign it?” she asked, looking at him directly this time. Her face was wide and blushing, but her eyes were squint
ing as if the boy behind the counter was a bright light flaring down at her. The bright light nodded and grabbed a pen from underneath the counter. But he hardly even bothered to smile at her. It was mean of him not to smile. If it was me, I would have beamed.
“Who to?” he asked. He didn’t need to smile; the girl loved him anyway.
“To Corinne.” Her feet crossed and uncrossed beneath her. She leaned into the counter and watched him sign.
“There you go,” he said, pushing it back toward her. She turned it around to face her and she read it, her face showing neither pleasure nor displeasure, just a fierce concentration, as if she were looking at a map of Los Angeles and trying to find a street that didn’t really exist. She muttered her thanks and pushed the record into her bag, moving quickly as if it was urgent now that she should leave. He didn’t even watch her go. He turned to me.
“Need any help?” he said, raising those peaky eyebrows. He seemed brusque, almost bored and impatient with life. His foot tapped away maniacally beneath the counter, and he rubbed his hair so it stood up even more.
“Got any Fats Waller?” I acted nonchalant.
He bunched up his lips and looked at me with a bored kind of frown. It was as if I’d asked him a supremely dull question. I worried for a minute that I still had sand on my cheek, or maybe I really was the ugliest person in the world.
“In the jazz section.” His voice sounded tired. I could tell immediately that the jazz section was the wrong section to be looking in, in his opinion, and if I’d wanted to impress him I’d just lost a lot of marks. I went and looked, but I wasn’t concentrating very well on looking. Why would I want to impress him, anyway? I wondered if he was famous.
“You in a band?” I asked when I went back to the counter with The Best of Fats Waller in my hand.
“Yep.”
“What’s it called?”
“The Thin Captains.” His fingers rapped on the counter. He leaned on one arm and his eyes seemed to swagger, like a drunk looking for a fight.
“What do you play?”
I wasn’t quite sure what he was thinking. He appeared to be examining me. I felt my hand floating up to my shoulder and I pushed my fingers under the strap of my dress. He stood up straight. He was good-looking. I realized it all of a sudden and I felt strange and loaded up with the realization.
“I’m the singer,” he said. I didn’t reply. Instead I looked above him at a poster, because I could tell my heart was behaving strangely, clawing at my chest like a yabbie in a bucket. “We’re playing tonight. At the Espy. Come along, if you want.” He reached underneath the counter and pulled out a flyer. I took it and glanced up at him. It was meant to be a casual glance but it didn’t come out casual. It came out burning. I could feel my eyes opening out and trying to swallow the sense of him. His mouth moved a little bit on one side. He wouldn’t be swallowed, not by my eyes.
“Okay,” I said and then, just to make myself not appear too available, I added, “I’ll try.”
He shrugged and I felt my cheeks reddening, as if all that strange flapping and leaping inside had whooshed up into my face. I put my hand over my mouth and stopped for a minute. He was still looking at me, but I couldn’t think of a thing to say, so I had to leave. There was no other choice.
Once I was a safe distance away from the shop, I examined the flyer. It didn’t tell me anything more about him, the Thin Captain. It did say Esplanade Hotel, Gershwin Room, five dollars cover charge, St. Kilda. So then I knew what I would do that night. I walked up the road, but my eyes had gone soft and I wasn’t noticing anything. I was creating a dream. The Thin Captain was singing and even though there was a crowd of people watching, I knew it was a song for me. This little fantasy was every now and then disturbed by the memory of what went on between us in the shop. Nothing, said Mean Person. He hardly noticed you. Then again, I thought cheerfully, he did ask me to come tonight and he didn’t ask the black-clad girl. It was especially pertinent, this last observation, that he hadn’t asked the other girl. I clung to it. Proof that I was especially invited. Then I fell back to dreaming of the Gershwin Room, where it would all happen.
The thing about Harry, I thought, as I saw him in my mind’s eye, standing there forlornly in the crowd at the Gershwin room, was that he didn’t do anything. Not anything you could really be proud of or boast about. If someone said to you, “And what does your husband do?” and just say Harry Jacob was your husband, well, you’d have nothing very impressive to say. “Oh, he picks apples and fixes things around the house, and he whistles.”
It was true that Harry was just a big slowcoach. He was always stopping and cocking his head and listening. “Hear that?” he said when we walked down by the Springs. “I reckon it’s a skylark.” I couldn’t tell how the sound came into his head, right when we were talking or walking along and I was so caught up in the thoughts I was having I couldn’t hear anything, because I wasn’t listening. Why would you always listen to the big blur of buzzing and trilling and cracking and croaking that came out of the bush and paddocks? The other annoying thing Harry did was to stop when a dog came along, any old dog, and Harry had to have a pat. And not only dogs, also flowers, most particularly roses. I didn’t mind him patting and sniffing and touching; it was just that he was always stopping and it made me feel as if he wasn’t ever getting anywhere, because he was too distracted. I bet that Thin Captain never stopped to smell plants and flowers and apple blossoms. That Thin Captain was going places.
By the time Harry got out of the hospital, I already knew I was leaving. I was leaving Blackjack Road and I was leaving my old life. The problem with Harry was that he may have suited the old Mannie, but he wouldn’t suit the new one. Like my mum said, he was just a country boy. It was because of Harry that Eddie had been driving to Melbourne. Harry said they were going to see a band that he wanted to see. I didn’t blame him for the accident. I really didn’t. It wasn’t that. It was just I got this idea that he wasn’t right.
He came over to see me when he got out of the hospital. He stood in the doorway holding a bunch of blue hydrangeas.
He pushed them toward me. “Thanks,” I said. They dripped all over me. I went to the kitchen and found a vase. In the living room, Harry sat on the couch and I stood by the fire. Harry didn’t look right on the new couch. He hovered on the edge of it, his hands clasped in front of him. He had lovely hands, though. I didn’t let myself look at his lovely hands. I knew I should have sat down next to him and we should have been close, but I was afraid to sit near him in case it made me love him. So I stood and I rocked on my feet and I tried to think of something to say.
“You fully recovered, Harry? Your ribs and internals, I mean.”
“Yeah, as good as. I have to take it easy for a while.”
I nodded slowly. I didn’t know what else to say.
“You seem different, Mannie,” he said.
“I am different.” I shrugged. “Aren’t you?”
“Yeah. Kind of. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I just don’t feel—” I looked at the floor. Harry stood up.
“I understand, Mannie. It’s fine. I’ll go.” He put his hand on my shoulder and I looked at him and saw his slopey-down eyes looking so soft I almost cried. I almost bled. I almost fell toward him. But I was kind of stunned and frozen too. It confounded me, how my feelings jumped one way and then, just as strong, they could jump the other way. How could I trust them? I couldn’t. I stuffed them inside and stood all stiff as a cold fish. I’d made my decision. I should stick to what I knew. Harry’s hand trailed away down my arm as he left. I felt terrible afterward, and I went and cried.
I was right not to fall back into the arms of Harry Jacob. Harry just wouldn’t suit the new A-class Mannie. Not like the Thin Captain would. I walked farther up the street. I just walked because I was in the kind of spectacular mood that I was meant to be in. My situation had finally found me, I was sure of it. The more I thought about what had happened in the music shop
, the more I was sure, and the more I felt sure, the more everything began to change around me. I was in love. What a relief. The address, Eddie’s address, began its burning again, and I was beginning to feel sure about that too. All in all, I was pretty convincing.
It was like the beginning of summer when hot air wafts in the window: There was an excited bursting feeling inside me. But it couldn’t quite burst; there was a tightness inside me too. And the bursting was pushing up against the tightness and the tightness was pushing back against the bursting and this created a supremely good and giddy pressure, an almost almost feeling, more almost than I’d ever before been. There was, if I let myself admit it, a little sharp edge to the feeling. If I could have, I would have kept the almost almost feeling and not risked its ending. I truly considered never going to see the Thin Captain, and just feeding my heart with the idea of him, crumb by crumb, so I could live forever in a permanent state of almost almost. It might not work out like it should, if I did go. Maybe I didn’t need to go to number 37 Tennyson Street either. But I knew I had to do both, because the minute I thought of not going, the almost almost feeling began to deflate and lose pressure. So I quickly pumped it up again by assuring myself that I would go.
I did try at least to stop thinking of the Thin Captain, but he was everywhere. He was in the blue sky beating down on my bare shoulders, he was in the fancy old flats, he was in my future. I tried to think of a song to sing, but the only song that kept coming to me was a Bob Dylan song that Harry used to sing, and I wasn’t going to sing that.
I put myself back on track and looked for a place to eat. I was on Fitzroy Street, which was lined with shops, two big old hotels, and a lot of Italian restaurants. I went into one that seemed kind of old and unpopular. I felt sorry for it. An old couple was seated with their backs against the wall and they were both just looking out. They weren’t speaking. When I walked in, the man stood up and stretched his big belly forward. He came toward me.
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