Autumn Laing

by Alex Miller

  While I was writing him I ate buckets of codeine tablets but they scarcely touched my headache. It was more than a headache. After I put the last word to him I woke up under the table with Sherry lying on my face purring, my notebooks scattered around me. I was frozen to the bone. It was a Sunday. I managed to crawl to my bed, howling and moaning, then I rang Andrew.

  Andrew, dear foolish man, came around at once and had a look at me. ‘You’re exhausted,’ he said, confidently making his diagnosis and arranging himself on the edge of my bed, settling himself into his bedside manner. Being professional. His breath smelling of wine. I’d probably dragged him away from his dinner. He was trying to ignore the stench in this place. ‘You must be more careful,’ he said, drawing breath slowly as if he inhaled a deadly gas. Andrew is a boy. He’s forty but he’s a boy. It hasn’t occurred to him yet that one day soon he’s going to be eighty. Yes, soon.

  He asked me what I’d been doing to get myself into such a state. Debilitated was his word for me. I obediently lifted my nightie for him and told him I’d been writing my memoir. That’s what I called it. A mild enough term for the scourging whip of memory. He raised a tawny eyebrow and repeated the word, ‘Memoir.’ Surprised, no doubt, to discover that memoir writing could be so ravaging. ‘You’ve had an unusual life,’ he said, leaning over me and tapping my ribs with the hard point of his index finger, so that a faint booming could be heard, as if I have an ocean cavern inside me. ‘I’m sure everyone will be interested to read about you and your famous circle of friends.’ That’s how he put it. He advised me gravely to get someone in to help with it. Someone to whom I could dictate my thoughts and who would then go off and type them up and bring them back for me to check over. He has no idea. In Andrew’s world there is a practical solution for every problem. But are there practical solutions for the torments of the soul? What a laugh. I laughed. ‘An amanuensis, you mean?’ I said. But he didn’t know the word for what he was prescribing. I said, ‘Is that the way you prescribe drugs too?’

  He had no idea what I was talking about. He was listening to the wheezing of my lungs filling and emptying, not my voice. That cold thing shoved up my nightie, his hand on my bony shoulder. He is gentle and kind. I am an old woman and do not belong in the realities of Andrew’s world, nor he in mine. We do not communicate directly with each other but perform a kind of verbal ritual of appeasement. Old people are not young people grown old but are another species. We are transformed as pupae metamorphose into the imago, unrecognisable from our former state. I was reborn into old age, physically unrecognisable from my youthful self, supplied with another skin and another set of intentions than those I possessed when I was young. God knew what he was doing when he invented death for us. Andrew has three young girls, all under ten years of age. Why should he listen to me? I don’t expect him to. I am past being listened to by young men. I had my full share of being listened to. All I wanted from him was some strong painkillers. And a kilo or two of infallible sleep inducers. Bombs for my tormented head. Memory killers for the long nights I would have to endure.

  After Andrew had been to see me, except to do my business and to give Sheridan his daily scoop of dry food, I didn’t get out of my bed for a week. I survived without nutriment. A sip of water in the night. A solitary creature in the stench of its own den. That was me. Debilitated, alone and barely breathing. Terrified the nightmare of memory would find me in my vulnerable condition and return to torment me. You might have heard a cough if you had passed by. I never thought for a moment I was going to die. I knew by then that my death wasn’t going to be that easy. My mother telephoned me six weeks before she died. We had not spoken for years. She addressed me as if she and I were close, and had been used to sharing our most intimate anxieties with each other, though of course this had never been the case.

  ‘I’ve had an offer of death, darling,’ she told me. I replied, ‘It’s probably the best offer you’re going to get at your age, Mother.’ She was then the age I am now. She did not respond to my lack of generosity. Perhaps she did not register it. ‘Three angels dressed in long white gowns came for me,’ she said. It was hardly original. ‘One stood either side of me and took me by my hands, which I stretched out to them willingly. The other stood behind me and told me in the softest voice that I could fall back into her arms and I would be safe forever. I almost let myself begin to float away with them, a blissful calm entering my soul like the effect of anaesthetic.’

  There was a long silence and I realised how deeply serious my mother was. How moved she had been by her night vision, and how she had known I was the only member of the family to whom she could confide such a thing without being scoffed at. ‘Then what happened?’ I asked. I was interested to know. ‘You are still here. What did you do?’ I heard her breathing. She said, ‘I resisted.’ Her voice was small and filled with guilty regret, like the voice of a little girl who has done something that will displease her elders. ‘Do you think I should have gone with them, darling?’ she asked me timidly. I said, ‘Yes, Mother, I think you probably should have.’ She died slowly, suffering a terrifying six-week decline into blindness and insanity, before the angels had the grace to come for her again. I have the means to take my own life, but will I have the presence of mind to judge the moment? I fear a death such as my mother suffered.

  Andrew sent a local nurse to care for me. I loathed having her in the house. She made herself cups of coffee and talked. Even on her first day she began to bully me. ‘There’s a funny smell in here,’ she said, looking about the kitchen that morning, raising her snout and sniffing the air.

  ‘I fart a lot,’ I said.

  She seemed to take my confession as a licence to tell me about her private life. She stood with her back to the stove, clutching her mug of Nescafé in both hands and gazing wide-eyed at nothing. She had brought the Nescafé herself. ‘I’ve been obsessed with orgasms since I was eleven,’ she said. ‘I don’t muck about. I’m not coy. When a bloke comes in I get all my gear off at once and we get on with it. There’s no need to be coy about sex.’

  ‘But surely,’ I said, ‘there is every need to be coy about sex.’

  She stepped across to where I was sitting at the table and tugged roughly at the collar of my dressing-gown. ‘It was tucked in at the back,’ she said severely, reprimanding me, as if this was what she had been hired to do.

  I informed her haughtily, ‘The eyes are the organs of seduction.’

  ‘Not any more, love.’

  Could this be true? I looked at her. She was short and rounded and very pale and, in defiance of the traditions of nursing, was dressed entirely in black. ‘But doesn’t a big naked white body standing in front of them put your men off?’

  ‘That smell’s really quite awful,’ she said. ‘What do you eat to make your farts smell so bad?’

  ‘Cabbages,’ I said.

  When I told her to leave she said Andrew had warned her that I would make difficulties and had told her not to take any nonsense from me. She stood over me to tell me this, her fat hands on her hips, her big round arms sticking out like elephant ears, her massive breasts fit to suffocate any bairn that got within sniffing distance of them. I wasn’t used to being bullied, but I knew she knew I was too weak to resist her. I’m sorry to say I quailed rather and didn’t try. My fear of her demoralised me and I began to think I would have a relapse and sink helplessly towards my mother’s death while this lump glowered over me.

  A week later I was sitting dejectedly at the round table out on the veranda, where I had been ordered to stay, a mug of cold Nescafé and a dirty saucer of dry toast in front of me (I had been forbidden cabbage), when a movement in the garden caught my eye. I looked up to see the bollard stepping daintily towards me across the dewy grass in her red patent-leather shoes. With a leap of the heart I knew the bollard would be a match for my orgasmic attendant.

  She stepped up onto the veranda. ‘Mrs Laing!’ she said, joy in her eyes. ‘It’s me! I’m back!’

/>   ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So I see. And I am very glad to see you, Adeli’—her real name, and only an American could possess such a name, is Adeli Heartstone. I had wondered if it mightn’t be a corruption of the warmer hearthstone, but I shall never know. I said to her (all at once no longer despised but now to be my anchoring bollard), ‘Will you please go into the kitchen and tell the woman there to get out of my house?’

  Adeli did not wait to take off her overcoat or to put down her things. Those two might have been sisters. I expected a fierce cat fight to erupt in the kitchen, but Adeli returned a minute or two later and laid her notebook and a small package on the table. She stood behind a chair and looked at me and smiled. ‘It’s chilly out here. Would you like me to help you into the kitchen, Mrs Laing?’

  ‘Well?’ I enquired sharply. ‘Did you tell her to leave or not? What did she say?’

  Adeli smiled a calm smile. ‘She’s gone. She won’t be back.’

  ‘What did you say to her?’

  ‘I told her I was your daughter and that I would be looking after you from now on.’ She looked down at me, her smile one of knowing celebration.

  ‘I don’t have a daughter,’ I said.

  ‘A long-lost daughter who has at last returned from America.’ She laughed, a careful laugh, testing the firmness of the newly won ground upon which she stood. Not braying. She would bray later.

  I looked at her. ‘And that brute believed you?’

  ‘Well, it might be true.’

  ‘I never had a daughter. I never had a child of any kind.’

  ‘Oh yes, I know that. But you might have.’ She looked me in the eye, serious, setting forth on her journey. ‘And I might have been that child.’

  ‘Choose one of his drawings for yourself,’ I said, struggling to get up, my legs stiff with the cold. ‘If you can find one among the mess in the dining room. And give me a hand up.’

  She took both my hands and helped me stand. ‘I’ll make us a hot chocolate,’ she said, steadying me against her. Her overcoat, or perhaps it was her blouse, had been liberally doused with Chanel No 5. I would know that scent anywhere. It always makes me sneeze.

  ‘I don’t like hot chocolate,’ I said. I was not about to hand myself from one bully to another.

  ‘You’ll like this one, Mrs Laing. It’s special. A treat.’ She held the flywire door for me.

  I turned to her. ‘That woman claimed to have six orgasms a day.’

  She followed me into the kitchen and I sat at the table. I was enormously relieved to be rid of the orgasmic blob. Adeli took her coat off and measured milk into Arthur’s copper pan. She paused with the milk carton half tipped and looked around at me. ‘Not every day, surely?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think every day.’

  ‘Did you witness any proof?’

  ‘Like a demonstration, you mean?’

  We both laughed.

  And that is how I acquired Adeli. Andrew having his way after all. Adeli wept tears of sincere sorrow when I told her I had burned my diaries and day books.

  When Arthur called me from his office in the city that fateful day a lifetime ago to tell me he would be bringing someone home for dinner, I was in the garden here at Old Farm planting roses with Barnaby. My existence, if not innocent in those days, was blissful. I was ignorant of the storm approaching us from the Great Southern Ocean. Arthur was at his rooms in Collins Street, poor man. Still ravelled up in his mother’s love knots. Slave knots, I called them. Her dream that her son would be a High Court judge before she died making his days miserable. I was no match for that woman’s clutches and never loosened her hold on him. Death did that for me. She was one of the few women whose will defeated mine with a man when I was in my prime. It was not until her death that he mobilised the courage to abandon the law. Mothers have the womb of advantage over us with their sons.

  I was ten years older than Pat. And taller. By a good inch. When I was at my full height. Which is not now, is it? We shrink. When I was wearing heels, passing shop windows on his arm I looked half a head taller than he. But Arthur was the seriously tall one. Two and a half inches taller than me. Beside Arthur, Pat was a shrimp. Arthur had stooped since third form at Scotch, at which time he shot up and was abashed by his alien body. A lost boy in the wretched body of a man. An expression for a youth that: shot up. That was Arthur Laing when I met him. Estranged from his father and from himself, a young man longing for invisibility. He held his stoop to the end of his life. It suited him when he was older. It made him look what we used to call distinguished. This can’t be said of anyone now, with everyone wearing T-shirts and those terrible baggy shorts. No one looks distinguished any more. Or wishes to. We have become a nation of the undistinguished and indistinguishable. Which are not the same thing. Though no doubt they soon will be.

  It’s raining and cold. I’ve been writing here at the table in the kitchen. The Rayburn is going. I’ve managed to get the oven needle around to hot. A real woman would be making scones. Adeli is not here. I wonder if she will make scones if I ask her nicely? I love the smell of the Rayburn, hot iron and a fragrant haze of red-gum smoke in the kitchen. It reminds me of my pre-cabbage days when this house was filled with people and the aromas of my wonderful cooking. Yes, I was known to be a fine cook.

  I miss cigarettes on indoor days like this. Sheridan is pretending to be asleep in his basket beside the wood box, one eye half open in case a mouse decides it’s safe to skip across the floor. Sheridan is a long-haired ginger tom and is no longer quick enough for mice, but he likes to count them. Stony came earlier with a load of wood. Felled and split green two seasons ago with his grandfather’s axe. I don’t know where he goes to get his wood but I do know Stony does not believe in chainsaws. He is a refugee from the past. He might almost be a liberated serf from the forests of Yasnaya Polyana. He’s Bulgarian, however, not Russian, from Chirpan, now a desolate Bulgarian town littered, I’ve been told, with abandoned Soviet factories. Stony is not his real name. We called him Stony because when we first knew him he rode a four-wheel bike designed and built by an eccentric English friend of his whose real name was Stony. A man from Norwich. A failed artist. That real Stony is dead. The bike had a trailer. Our (my) Stony’s real name is Zahary Deliradev. A beautiful name that’s wasted here as no one in Australia can be bothered to pronounce it. He lives alone and has little need of speech. He is a man without language. Arthur used to call him our silent witness. And maybe that is what he was, and still is. When he came round with the wood this morning I said, ‘Good morning, Stony. Can you manage that on your own?’ He grunted and got on with unloading his truck—a green Bedford from the fifties. His clothes smell of wood resins and earth mould and herbs that have been crushed against him. He is a true peasant. His perfect solitude in the midst of this teeming suburb is immensely impressive. To see him lifts my morale; so calm, so silent among the frenzy, independent, confident and alone in his old ways, he asks for no further authentication. As I watched him straining with a great armload of split red gum this morning I asked myself, Which of us two will go first?

  After Adeli turfed out the so-called nurse it rained heavily for several days (it’s raining now). I woke in the night to the rushing sound of the river breaking over the rock barrier. I got up and went out onto the back veranda. I love the sound of the river in spate and had not heard it for years. After a few minutes I realised I could smell the fragrance of the drenched ground cover in the remnant of bushland they have left to us on the far bank, cut through now by their elaborate bicycle track. Except for the occasional car swishing by on wet tyres the freeway was in its silent hour. The usual stench of diesel and petrol fumes dispersed, the old smells of this place risen again to greet me.

  In the clarity of the night I breathed once again the innocent air of our youthful days here and was moved to give thanks. But to whom was I to direct my gratitude? I need hardly tell you this: I wept. That brief moment alone in the night with our dear old smells deserved a good
cry, with lots of snuffling and hiccupping and sucking air and blowing my nose several times on the hem of my nightdress, remembering my darling Arthur holding me tightly against our vanishing years. That wretched dog next door must have heard my weeping and began to bark. Why must they all keep a dog? As if they are going to be called on to become nomads. We had cats. Cats make a home. Sheridan is the last of that tribe. He did not come out onto the veranda with me but stayed in his basket beside the stove.

  My resolve to continue with this returned that night. When I came inside I fetched my abandoned exercise book and read through what I had written up to the point where I left Pat that evening, surrounded by his crude drawings of Mr Creedy’s naked daughter. Those sheets of butcher’s paper must still be stored somewhere about this place. But where? Some of them were destroyed. I was with him when Pat destroyed them. Others were stolen, filched by scavengers when he became famous. Others lost. I rescued some from Freddy one wintry afternoon. He was very drunk and was trying to light the fire in the library with them. But there were a lot of them and some of them must still be here. I should like to find the one he wrote the poem on. The last one. There is decades of stuff here. It’s everywhere. I went into the dining room and switched on the light. The enormous mahogany table is piled with papers to a depth of more than two feet, the space underneath crammed with cartons of stuff. The mice have probably built their citadel in there. I couldn’t bear to touch it and switched the light off and closed the door on it. I shall leave it to Adeli to tackle. It will be compensation for her loss of my diaries.