***
When Maryanne enters the house she is still in a contented, almost dreamy state. But Katherine greets her and immediately annoys her as she has over the last few weeks. For a short while Maryanne was in a world of grand ideas and passion and hope. Then Katherine opened the door and her world seemed to shrink. And that hopeful, dream-like state evaporates. Katherine is shaking the baby’s rattle and making the kinds of baby sounds that, Maryanne has noticed, grown-ups make around babies. She thinks of it as baby language, and Katherine is speaking in some ridiculous baby language right now. And getting on her nerves. Katherine picks the baby up from the pram, almost snatches him, and walks to the kitchen with him, coo-cooing all the way. And it’s not just the way Katherine snatches the baby from the pram and all the coo-cooing baby talk that annoys Maryanne. The baby was rested; now he’s all stirred up.
It’s something she’s noticed lately. Katherine picking the baby up whenever she pleases. Treating him like he’s, well … hers. It’s becoming a habit. One that annoys her. And she’s dwelling on this, even brooding on it, though part of her knows she is being unfair, when they sit down in the kitchen.
‘Been to have your photograph taken,’ Katherine coos to the child. She turns to Maryanne. ‘How was it?’
Maryanne barely hears, for resentment is rising in her: her world, so wide a little while before, so full of hope and boundless possibility, has shrunken, and she is slow to respond.
‘Did you hear?’ Katherine is abrupt, the big sister speaking.
‘It was awkward,’ Maryanne finally says. She is suddenly in no mood to talk about parting kisses, and fine and good parting words.
‘And did the beautiful little boy behave?’
‘He was perfect.’
Katherine beams and rubs the child’s belly. ‘Of course he was. Where’s the knife and fork?’ she croons. ‘Who’s looking good enough to eat?’
Maryanne stares at her, as if willing her sister to just stop it. Why, why must she behave like this? So, so … so hopelessly what? And she ponders this for a moment, and realises that what she means is so hopelessly ordinary. Just like everybody else. No, let’s be honest. So hopelessly common. Knife and fork, indeed! She’s always hated the phrase and the way it comes with cooing women going gaga over babies. Her child is above all that. She knows it, she just has to look at him. Her child will be noble. Was never born for such baby talk. And for a moment (and it will not be the last time), part of her actually believes the tale of his birth: a noble family, oceans of vineyards and the giant family door slammed in her face. A tragic tale. No, her child will not have silly talk showered upon him, and will not be the ordinary run. The way Maryanne herself and Katherine have never felt part of the ordinary run. But this Katherine, cooing over the baby and talking nonsense about knives and forks, has somehow managed to slough off the other Katherine altogether: the Katherine who lives out there in the bush with her swag and rifle, the very Katherine whom newspapers will one day call a pioneer. Far from hopelessly ordinary.
Katherine bounces the child in her arms, babbling nonsense. ‘I’m going to eat you all up,’ she cries. ‘Yes, yes, all up’. And suddenly there is one bounce too many, one coo too much.
Be it tiredness, Victor, the tea-house, the revolting, uneaten, rock-hard cakes, Maryanne’s doesn’t know. But her annoyance bursts from her like a cannon blast. ‘Leave him!’
Everything stops. All smiles dissolve. Katherine stares back, silent and crestfallen. The fun suddenly gone out of her. The glint in her eyes extinguished. The child too is gazing at Maryanne, a frown on his face. Katherine, still holding the baby (the nearest thing to a child of her own she will ever have), slumps back in her chair. And straightaway Maryanne wishes she’d never spoken.
Why shouldn’t Katherine have her fun? Heaven knows she’s had so little of it: Katherine, grown too soon, and Maryanne always walking in her wake, protected from the world. Unaware of it, even. Why, why did she have to say that? Such a harmless bit of fun.
‘No,’ Maryanne says, trying to fix the broken moment, ‘don’t leave him. Don’t, please …’ But the fun has gone from Katherine and she hands the child to his mother. A gesture that says: it is true, I have acted out of turn. Of course, the child is not mine. I have behaved like a silly aunt, babbling silly aunt talk. It won’t happen again.
And Maryanne takes the child, almost reluctantly now, while Katherine, not knowing what to do with her hands, folds them in front of her. ‘You’re right,’ she says. ‘He should rest.’
They are both silent, almost afraid to speak. For there is a line of separation between them now that wasn’t there a moment before.
‘You were away a while,’ Katherine says, her tone sombre.
‘We went to a tea-house.’
‘Katherine nods, still dejected.
‘It was crowded,’ Maryanne adds, a way of explaining the time it took.
‘Of course.’
‘And it was awkward, if you must know.’ And she immediately raises her eyebrows in self-reproach. If you must know, indeed, she silently tells herself. Who is so hopelessly common now?
‘You don’t have to tell me.’
‘No, that’s not what I meant … He, he talked about offering a chance. Or, something like that. It was noisy and hot.’
Katherine looks up. ‘A chance? For what?’
‘For us, I suppose,’ Maryanne replies, catching the lost look in Katherine’s eyes, and again wishing she’d never spoken.
‘What did you say?’ Katherine asks, but there’s no great heart in the question.
‘I’m not sure I said anything. It’s too late, anyway.’
‘I suppose it is.’
Maryanne sighs. ‘Since when did he care?’
Katherine nods, her voice flat. ‘All the same, I won’t always be here.’ The child suddenly grins at her and she returns the hint of a smile.
‘No, you won’t,’ says Maryanne: a thoughtful, drawn-out no, one (and Katherine will have noted this) that does not carry with it the hint of any suggestion that she needn’t go. That she might just stay.
‘You won’t feel alone?’
Maryanne is still thoughtful, pausing before speaking. ‘There’ll be times.’
Katherine nods. ‘There will.’
‘And you?’
Katherine smiles, and though sad, this time it is a real smile. ‘There’ll be times.’
‘You’ll miss everything.’
‘I will,’ Katherine says, ‘but I’ll be busy.’
‘You’re welcome any time.’ A way of telling her: what I said, just now, I didn’t mean it.
‘I know.’ Katherine nods, understanding exactly what Maryanne both says and doesn’t say. ‘I know that.’
Maryanne smiles back, the moment still broken, but mended a little, at least. Glued back together. Like one of those cracked vases that still function but which bear all the marks of having been broken and reassembled and are never what they were.
The room hums in thoughtful silence. Maryanne rises, taking the child with her, leaving her sister motionless in her chair, her eyes lowered once again.
In the bedroom she changes the child, then releases her breast, which the child grasps immediately. Mine, it says, hands around the breast, lips fastened to the nipple. Mine. And when he’s finished she places him in the cot, smoothing his brow, the dark V of the widow’s peak that is Victor’s, as he falls asleep.
All around the house is silent and still, apart from the child’s breathing and the rising and falling of his chest. Katherine, she imagines, is still fixed to her chair, her eyes lowered. Maryanne takes the child’s hand and feels his grip, even in sleep. At the same time she registers that yes, there will be times. Just as there will be times for all of them, even the child who, at this moment, can’t possibly conceive of being alone. But there will be times when loneliness will come to him, as it does to everyone. And she tightens her grip. Not yet, little one. Not yet.
19.
As Maryanne smooths the widow’s peak, the brow of her sleeping child, both at rest in the separate peace they have negotiated with the world, Michael makes his way up the steps of the Métro and the city begins to appear. When he reaches the top, it is all laid out before him. A feast, a fantasy come to life. Just as he imagined. And more. He lowers his suitcase and pauses, taking in the spectacle. And tired as he is after a twenty-four-hour flight, it’s as if his senses – sight, sound, smell – have rarely been so alert.
He can think of only a few previous occasions when the world took his breath away like this. Once when he was a boy, when propelling a red leather ball through the air at great speed, when the pursuit of the perfect delivery (the delivery that, in all its perfection, would stop the suburb), consumed his days. On one of those days he was walking through the dark, shady caverns of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, down the steps towards the oval for the first time, when he stepped into bright, blinding, late-morning summer light, and the dazzling, green-carpeted playing field was suddenly spread out before him: white figures on the field standing perfectly still, batsmen perfectly still, the only moving figure that of the fast bowler swooping down upon the pitch – something about to happen. Now the city opens out in front of him. This too is one of those moments, and he pauses, senses alert, taking it in as he had that distant playing field.
Montparnasse-Bienvenüe. Strange name for a train station. The wide boulevard in front of him is cluttered with cars, scooters and vans: red, green, yellow, blue – a moving canvas. It is a dull winter’s day in December. December. The very word for Michael is synonymous with summer, school holidays and cricket. But even on this dull day in a different kind of December, the boulevard is bright with colour and movement. The pedestrian lights change and overcoated workers cross, for it is still early in the morning. And it is while he is watching them that Michael registers that these people are going to work. That it is just another day. Just another crossing. And it occurs to him that he may be the only one pausing to marvel at the spectacle.
And it is a spectacle that is as foreign to the world of his father and the grandmother he never really knew as the landscape of Mars. For Michael comes from the age of silver jets, winters in December and a world made smaller by speed. And Maryanne’s world is as foreign to him as his would be to her. And although she may well have been one of those who were thrown into a world that was not theirs, one of those ahead of their times, this world her true one, he’s wondering if she would have wanted it. Really wanted it, had her wish been granted.
As he picks up his suitcase and walks towards the nearest cafe for breakfast, it is the question of just who she was and what her world felt like that preoccupies him. That and the dazzling spectacle of colour and movement all around him.
But there is also that distinct sense of bringing family ghosts to the table he sits at, as though generations of living have gone into this journey and this simple act. That the act of sitting at a cafe table in a distant foreign city is a layered one, made possible by the dead and the living. Maryanne and his father are part of that layering, just as he himself will be one day for those who will come after him. The generations are always weaving in and out of each other, constantly refining themselves, so that when occasions such as this arise, everybody sits at the table. For history – of a country or a family – is never dead. And history is not just the deeds or misdeeds of the dead, nor is it stuck in the past; it is alive in us. They – our parents, their parents, and the public figures they brushed with – are alive in us, flowing through our veins and living on in our memory and our thoughts, both casual and deliberate. There in even the simplest of daily acts.
And even the waiter’s bonjour, it strikes him, is just such an act as well. He smiles. His voice is bright. But all part of the job, like the pressed white shirt, the vest and napkin over his arm. It’s a greeting, and business. And whether he’s right or not, Michael can imagine generations of waiters going into that simple greeting: one that also, in its manner of delivery, leaves Michael in no doubt that the gentleman is in charge. He may be serving, but he is not servile. You are at his table. Bonjour.
In poor schoolboy French, the effort of which, at least, is appreciated, Michael orders. And when his breakfast appears (bread, butter, jam, croissant and coffee), his senses, once more, are alert as they rarely are. The world is made new by the simplest things. Adventure tasted and smelled in the simplest things. And as he eats, staring at the moving canvas all around him, he is aware of sitting at a crowded table.
But if history, of family and country, lives on in us and crowds our tables, who were they and how does this happen? How is it that they seem to be there: not so much seen, as presence that is felt. It is, he decides, a kind of reincarnation. They live on in memory and are recreated at the same time. And what we end up with is both true and untrue. An educated guess, an intuition. A leap of faith. And she’s there, in front of him or beside him, Maryanne, at odd and surprising times, with that gentle smile she gave to the camera, which lives on in the two or three surviving photographs of her. An elderly, grey-haired woman on the brink of an observation that tells you she’s watching you and that there’s more than meets the eye to this simple old lady. With her shrewd stare. Her sharp, intelligent eyes. But who was she back then, when her belly was swollen with Michael’s illegitimate father? For it was then, when the world turned in on itself, and went to war with itself, that she made the biggest decision of her life.
The traffic on the boulevard suddenly intrudes on his thoughts as a police car, siren blaring, speeds by. Crowds press to pedestrian crossings, the cafe begins to fill. The moving canvas changes before his eyes. The world, here and now, imposes itself. Maryanne has disappeared from his table. They all have: the grandmother he never really knew, his father, his mother, the child he was, and the stick-house suburb on the fringes of the city that they all came to. All gone, and yet always there. His table no longer crowded. He is alone, for the moment. All of them ancient history, and yet alive. Immediate. The past, but never gone. For better or worse.
Michael calls for the bill, and when it comes he produces a colourful note from his wallet and pauses to admire it before leaving it on the tray. He rises from the table and joins that moving canvas, crossing the boulevard and entering the station the grand trainlines depart from. A journey in front of him. The whole travelling world of the past coming with him. The new and the old, the past and the present, travelling side by side.
20.
Katherine is slow to come to breakfast in the morning. Unusual. She is always the first at the table, even prides herself on it. The early bird who never sleeps in. As Maryanne sits there, feeding the child, she gradually becomes aware of the sound of drawers opening and closing. She quickly understands. Then Katherine emerges from her room, her swag under her arm, and puts it down in the hallway. She smiles at Maryanne and the child, then returns for her tent and rifle, placing them alongside her swag. All her worldly goods. And Maryanne wishes she had a camera, for this is the complete Katherine.
Then she moves back into the kitchen, and the moment containing the complete Katherine is gone. The process has taken one or two minutes, and in that time neither Katherine nor Maryanne has spoken.
‘You don’t need me now,’ Katherine finally says, sitting down in front of her.
‘Don’t I?’
‘You know you don’t.’ Katherine’s voice is soft, soothing, reassuring. ‘Trust me. I’ll be in the way.’
‘Never.’
Katherine smiles, as if to say, thanks for the thought, but we both know I’m right. ‘One day I will be. Best to leave before then.’
Maryanne is silent, a silence that she knows and Katherine knows is as good as a yes.
Katherine nods. ‘My job’s done now.’ And she looks at the child, who she as good as brought into the world, whose first cries she heard as she held him up for Maryanne to see (a moment she will carry throughout her life, like her sw
ag and tent), changed and grown already.
And Maryanne sees the changes, just as Katherine does too. Just as she sees the years rushing towards her, the baby growing up, the image of what he may become standing in front of her, while she and Katherine hover about as the aged figures they will be when that time arrives. It is a thought too exquisitely sad to be held for long. For it will happen quickly, and these days, these days that got the job done, will too easily slip from them.
Katherine shifts her gaze back to Maryanne. ‘But I’ll be back.’
‘Any time.’
‘To see you and the boy…’
‘Your room will be waiting.’
‘… when you least expect it.’
Maryanne smiles. ‘Of course. We’ll be happily ambushed.’
It is done. They nod. Katherine rises. ‘I’ll have to book my ticket. I’ll be gone a while.’
‘Breakfast?’
‘Later.’
And with that Katherine kisses Maryanne and the child, then sweeps up the hallway and out the front door into the glare of the day. When she shuts the door behind her the house is quiet and strangely still. And suddenly the sight of Katherine’s swag, tent and rifle, all her worldly goods, stacked in the hallway, waiting for her departure, is too much, and eyes stinging, Maryanne turns from them in case they see.
Late in the afternoon, when Maryanne returns from her daily walk with the child and puts the pram in the hallway, noting that the rocking rhythms of the pram ride have put the child to sleep, she hears a sound, a glorious sound, coming from the kitchen. A man’s voice, high and rich. An orchestra. A concert, coming to her in melodic waves up the hallway. ‘Sumptuous’ is the word that comes to mind. And drawn to the sound – understanding the power of the siren’s call as she never has before – she drifts, spellbound, to the kitchen.
Year of the Beast Page 19