Cooee

by Vivienne Kelly

Ready, steady, Teddy, go!

  He would chant it again and again, capering and spinning like a dervish, shouting the last line in explosive glee, grinning evilly.

  ‘Do you ever worry about Dominic?’ Steve asked me once, tentatively, after one of these performances.

  ‘No,’ I lied.

  ‘You don’t find that teddy rhyme of his ... well, a little disquieting? He’s only six, after all.’ Steve scratched his head, regarding me with ill-concealed anxiety.

  ‘No,’ I said, calmly, though I agreed with Steve, deep down.

  It was disquieting. But, now, as I look back, I think it might have taught him to understand death, not to fear it, to live with it. I couldn’t live with it, not at any rate with my mother’s death. Perhaps one needs to be a touch disquieting to survive. Perhaps being disquieting is something to be fostered.

  I actually tried to make myself cry, by hauling out all of the best memories I had of my mother. I remembered, for instance, the time Zoë had bossed me about the garden. I suppose I was about five, which would have made her ten. I think we had been given a children’s gardening set; or perhaps it was only Zoë’s. There was a little, wooden-handled rake, I recall, its prongs painted red, and a blue spade. Somewhere there is a photograph of Zoë holding these items, smirking.

  Our father had dug us a space in the backyard so that we could plant our own flowerbed. He went to a good deal of trouble: the bed was kidney-shaped and beautifully edged. I can’t remember now what the cause of the quarrel was, but perhaps we wanted different flowers, or perhaps Zoë regarded me as slave labour and forced me into too much digging and raking.

  At any rate, it all ended in tears and I recall my mother sweeping me, sobbing, into her arms and bearing me off. It is this feeling of being suddenly swooped upon and borne off, a shred of dandelion upon a great maternal gust, rescued, safe, that principally stays with me.

  As I clung to my mother, startled by her action but relishing it, I can remember a gush of emotion for her, a kind of grateful daughterly access of affection, which I now tried unsuccessfully to re-create.

  Recollection of other, similar incidents was equally unavailing: I didn’t understand why. One loves one’s parents: of course one does. One is sad when they die. Isn’t one?

  I wanted to grieve; I wanted to mourn. I wanted to deserve the kindness and mute concern, the slightly deferential consideration people like Bea and Dawn were extending to me. The discovery that I couldn’t plunge myself into these processes made me abstracted and bad-tempered. I tried to explain this to Max.

  ‘I don’t feel it as I think I ought to.’

  ‘Is there an “ought” about how you feel grief?’ he asked.

  ‘Possibly not, but even I feel there’s something unsatisfactory about my response.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well.’ My brain was sluggish.

  It was late, time to go to bed. We were sitting in the living room, on the milky leather lounge suite with its long curves that were somehow both sumptuous and pristine. I picked up the meteor stone from the coffee table and rolled it from one palm to another, absent-mindedly relishing its coolness and density, its clean spherical perfection.

  ‘It’s so hard to know how to put it, Max. I expect to feel sorrow, and I look inside myself for the place where the sorrow ought to be, where it’s kept, so to speak, and I can’t find it there.’

  ‘What do you find instead?’

  ‘A kind of blankness, to tell you the truth. Almost an emptiness.’

  ‘Mightn’t that be an aspect of sorrow?’

  ‘I don’t know? Might it?’

  ‘Tell me, my beautiful Belle, why does it worry you so?’

  ‘Because I worry that I’m a monster,’ I said, hearing my voice break. ‘Because I worry that if I can’t properly register grief, I can’t properly register love, I can’t love. She was my mother, for God’s sake: why can’t I feel her death more, like Zoë does, like Kate does? Even Dominic is more upset than I am, Max. I ought to be inconsolable; I ought to be bursting into tears; I ought to be devastated, and I’m just not.’

  He came and sat beside me, and held my face in his hands. ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘You know I do.’

  He kissed me, warmly, tenderly. ‘You are the most loving, most caring, kindest, dearest woman in the world. I adore you. You mustn’t do this to yourself.’

  That seemed to terminate the conversation. We went to bed. We didn’t make love that night, but we lay like spoons, me fitting into the contours of his lean body, him holding me. I fell asleep like this.

  He brought me such peace, such confidence.

  He brought more than that, too. He came home one day, perhaps a month after my mother’s death, with a large white box. He set it on the kitchen bench and looked at me with his beguiling crooked smile.

  It had been a rough day at work: I was peeling potatoes, I think, and drinking wine, and trying to overcome the dragging depression that continued to tug me downwards, some days.

  ‘Where’s Katie?’ he asked. They often attached the suffix to each other’s names. She was Katie; he was Maxie. I don’t know why.

  ‘In her room,’ I said, eyeing the box and feeling a faint thud of disappointment that it evidently wasn’t for me.

  He called Kate and she came running down the stairs.

  ‘Now,’ he said, in a considering way. ‘What are we going to do, here?’

  A faint scuffle came from the box and Kate’s face lit up.

  ‘A pet!’ she cried. ‘Maxie, have you bought me a pet?’

  ‘Well, now,’ he said, stroking his chin.

  Max loved these situations. He was never happier than when he was opening his wallet and throwing hundred-dollar bills around. Partly this was a matter of pure generosity; partly it was a case of an innate love of splendour, of luxury, of abundant surprise and lavish gesture.

  ‘Well, now,’ he said, pulling a comical face. ‘There’s a bit of a problem.’

  Kate and I laughed and he grinned back at us.

  ‘The thing is, you see, I have a present and I’m not sure who it’s for.’

  ‘Show it to us,’ crowed Kate. ‘If you show it to us we’ll work out who it’s for.’

  ‘Ah, no,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t work, you see. You’ll both want it.’

  He was teasing Kate, but his eyes sought mine and smiled in the manner of someone who was sharing a superb and immense secret with the only person who mattered. He could always do this to me; he could always make me feel that everyone else in the world was peripheral: I was the core and the heart and the centre of everything for him.

  Kate’s excitement was becoming uncontrollable, and he started to lift the box’s lid, only to pause and say anxiously: ‘You’ll have to share it, mind. You’ll both have to share it. You’ll have to borrow it from each other.’

  And there he was, Borrow, a golden Labrador puppy with impeccable lineage and huge floppy paws and a heart-melting smile. He scrambled out of the box and into Kate’s plump and eager arms, wagging his tail and whimpering with enthusiasm and wriggling and licking her face while she issued rapturous little screams.

  Borrow was to become so integral a part of our lives that it was hard to believe we had not always had him. Noble and stupid, he treated Max and Kate with all the adulation his giant heart could muster, which was considerable. They were his favourites; me he tolerated.

  And yet he has finished up, happily enough, with me and with neither of his heroes; it is with me that his days will amble to what I hope will be a benign and pain-free end. Old and venerable now, with white whiskers, increasingly cloudy eyes and a gammy hip, he limps after me and good-naturedly pretends he doesn’t remember the dark side of me. Do dogs remember? I am sure Borrow does.

  It wasn’t only the dog
that arrived in my life with such panache, such bold munificence. Addicted as he was to the grand entrance, the dispensation of gifts, Max kept on spoiling himself and me. He walked in the door one evening with a large, flat, silver box, an extravagant crimson ribbon jauntily tied on top of it. I eyed it inquisitively.

  ‘I bought you a wedding dress,’ he said, all crinkly grin, presenting it to me.

  It was so like Max. No preliminaries, no questions. There was no question, of course. No proposal. We were head over heels, still; then and always. We both understood that we were partners forever, that we couldn’t live without each other.

  ‘Who am I marrying?’ I asked, undoing the box. ‘When?’

  He laughed.

  It was a floaty, fine thing: layers of shimmer, lilac and aquamarine, crystal and snow. It had drifted right out of the silky expensive-smelling pages of Vogue into my delighted arms. The material was so delicate you could have passed the entire dress through a wedding ring. He had bought shoes, too: fragile jewelled sandals, with soft leather soles and sleek gleaming straps.

  He was extraordinary like that: how many men are there in the world who could walk into a dress shop or a shoe shop and choose so unerringly, with such imagination and confidence? He always knew sizes and colours; he understood my preferences and my style and everything about me.

  ‘They’re not my colours,’ I said, marvelling, letting the fineness of it slip through my fingers, like bright shadows of silk, almost no substance to it.

  ‘They’re not the colours you usually wear,’ said Max, dropping a kiss on the back of my neck. ‘It doesn’t mean they’re not your colours.’

  ‘It’ll make me look sallow.’

  He snorted. ‘Try it on and see.’

  I did. I didn’t look sallow.

  ‘I thought a beach wedding,’ he said, while I twirled in front of the mirror, craning to see different views, liking them all. ‘Twilight.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Whenever you say.’

  I tried to describe all this to Zoë. I made a real effort.

  ‘I couldn’t bear it,’ she said.

  ‘Couldn’t bear what?’

  ‘Such an overbearing attitude. I don’t know what’s happened to you, Minky: once upon a time you wouldn’t have put up with being pushed around like this.’

  ‘He’s not pushing me around,’ I snapped. ‘He doesn’t push me around.’

  ‘I couldn’t bear it. It’s not natural, for a man to act that way. How is it he knows so much about women’s clothes? You ask him that.’

  ‘You’re just jealous.’

  She laughed, nastily. ‘Jealous? Of you and your con man? Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I’d be jealous,’ I said, spite getting the better of me. ‘If I was married to Henry, I’d be jealous of just about every other woman on the face of the earth.’

  She gave me a wounded look. ‘Anyway, those colours don’t suit you.’

  Well, it’s no wonder I didn’t invite her to the wedding, which happened about four weeks afterwards, just as he’d said, on a fine, still evening, on a beach down on the Peninsula, near Point Leo, at twilight.

  I got Bianca Crawford and her husband to be witnesses; no one else came. I didn’t want anybody else. Bianca was about the only one of my acquaintances not to resist Max. We had coffee once, and I told her about how unfair everybody was, and she laughed and leant forward and tapped my cheek. Bianca was half-Italian and when she felt like it she would become very European.

  ‘Don’t you worry about it, cara. You go and live your own life. Don’t you give a damn about any of them, old killjoys.’

  ‘You like him, don’t you, Bianca?’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Like? Like? I fancy him, my dear, and so do they, if they were only honest. Oh, but he is a dangerous man, you mark my words, Isabel. E uomo molto pericoloso, cara. Believe me. You take care with your Max.’

  I laughed, knowing how safe Max in fact was. I could see why she called him pericoloso: it had to do with the sharp edge of his sexuality, the vertiginous quality of it, the physical frisson he generated, the quiet sizzle of his mere presence. But he wasn’t really dangerous at all. I’d never felt safer with anyone in my life.

  So Bianca was delighted to be invited. She used up a roll of film with languishing shots of us standing in our finery on the flat white sand, gazing together at the sunset, walking hand in hand into the golden beyond, kissing against a tangerine sky. She sent us copies later and Max said they looked like ads for Jim Beam and coke.

  Max had a friend who was a celebrant. She was a plump, motherly lady who wore a rather lovely, black tailored pant suit and read a beautiful service; and she kissed me afterwards with, it seemed to me, real feeling and affection.

  We drove to a swanky hotel in Portsea and got tipsy over dinner and made love several times in a gorgeous suite with a four-poster bed. It was so romantic I almost didn’t feel married. That’s a laugh, now.

  I kept my name. Weaving is my own name, not Steve’s. At the time of our marriage, it was unusual for a woman to retain her maiden name, but Steve’s surname is Bell. Even so rigid a conservative as my mother could see that I didn’t want to be called Isabel Bell. Steve’s mother wasn’t so sympathetic, but her name was Marjorie, so the problem hadn’t presented itself for her. And by now, of course, I had a professional name — not a huge one, but in certain circles well known enough for me to want to keep it.

  Bea was as difficult about it as everybody else. I told her I’d be away on the Monday (married on Saturday: two days’ honeymoon didn’t seem unreasonable to me). She asked why and I told her. She sniffed disapprovingly.

  ‘Oh, Christ, Bea!’ I said. ‘You’re my oldest friend as well as my partner. Don’t you go and put me in the doghouse, too.’

  ‘It’s not a matter of putting you in the doghouse. It’s a matter of seeing you stuff up your life, your husband’s life, your kids’ lives.’

  ‘Steve’s not my husband any more. The divorce is through. I haven’t stuffed up anyone’s life. I’m just living my own.’

  ‘Izzie,’ she said, stretching out her hand. ‘Izzie, just living your own life isn’t possible. You know that. Everything we do touches on other people, on other people’s lives. You know that. It’s so awful to watch. I just find it infinitely depressing to see you permanently infatuated with that — that — gigolo.’

  I shrugged and turned away. I was so wounded and so angry that I couldn’t trust myself to say anything.

  It hurt a lot, of course, that everyone was so harsh to me, so determined to judge me, not to understand. Sometimes I felt oppressed by the malice they all seemed suddenly to be sprouting, by the burble and hiss of spite. At first, as I’ve said, I tried to explain. To Bea, to Zoë. I could no longer explain to my mother, since she was dead, but she hadn’t wanted to understand, any more than they did.

  But I was happy; I was incredibly, wildly happy: that was what they couldn’t understand, how essential that happiness had become to me. Happiness bubbled through my blood: I felt I had little neon glows flickering like Christmas lights through my veins. When I walked down the street, when I went to the shops, it seemed to me everyone must notice and admire my incandescence.

  Yet, although I was so happy, it was at this time that the Lost Dream started. This is not something I can explain. I woke one night next to Max, perhaps two hours after making love, in a cold sweat, weeping.

  I had never before woken from a dream, from sleep, with actual tears sliding down my face. The dream had begun as it always has done, subsequently, with a stroll through bushland, walking through the dull silver gleam and tangy air of eucalypts. I am content: it is warm; I am secure; the bush is beautiful, restful. Magpies chortle; rosellas dart and chatter.

  But the air turns colder and the path more winding and
the trees more swarming, pushing their way over the path. I walk on, knowing I have to get to the end of the path, knowing I have to reach a certain point. But it is colder and darker all the time. I panic; I try to turn back, but the seething trees block my way. And I cry cooee.

  It is what we were taught to do as children, if we walked or played in the bush — at regular intervals, to stop and shout cooee. It is what Australian children have always been taught to do. Well, that is the myth, anyway. Most Australian children these days are brought up in the synthetic environment of the suburbs: they may see a gum tree in a park occasionally but they wouldn’t know real bush if they fell over it.

  But there are old legends of the bush, old legends of the children who were lost in it — some whose bodies were never found. The bush scoops a wandering child into its heart quicker than you would believe. So, if you are lost, you cry cooee. And back, strong and sweet, comes the answering cooee of father or brother or friend. If you remain within cooee, we are told, you will never be lost.

  And now I call cooee, cooee — but I have gone beyond cooee; there is nobody to hear me; nothing around me but the teeming, muttering bush that could contain anything, anything at all.

  I feel rather than hear a low vibration emanating from the crowding leaves, which quiver above me, sage-green, pale silver, thin as paper, thin as skin. I am so cold I can hardly breathe. The wild cackle of kookaburras explodes in my ears.

  My heart’s in a flurry; it’s like a lunatic, plump pigeon hurling itself against the cage of my ribs, heavy, panic-stricken.

  Cooee, I cry, and again, in accelerating desperation. Cooee. No one answers; no one is there to answer; I am alone in the world. Fear possesses me utterly. I wake, weeping.

  Max was not generally speaking a patient man, not perhaps somebody who readily sympathised with psychic ailments and traumas of the imagination; but he was always tender with me after this dream. He used to call it the Lost Dream, capitalising it somehow, as if to acknowledge its searing power over me, its horror. I still have the dream sometimes; and now it doubly sears me: when I wake from it, sweating and shaking, I miss his hard arms around me, his murmur in my ear, his long, kind fingers stroking my neck, soothing me.