Boscovicz’s story of passion and war was being fitted into a strange era that existed only in the director’s imagination, a melding of eighteenth-century Hungary and twenty-second-century Somewhere Else. Chloe was amazed how seriously everyone took this ridiculous illusion. Of course, everyone was being paid to do their bit, but there was something else, something about this close work Magda was doing now, with her chalk and her pins and her muttering, the time it took, the bother she was going to—even though the audience, metres away, would miss anything but the general effect, the gorgeousness, the nest-likeness.
‘So, are you a music student, up at the Con?’ said Magda.
‘Nope. I’m going to uni next year, to start the BA.’ Chloe had learned that you used such ironic emphasis to show that you recognised that a Bachelor of Arts went nowhere, was just a constructive way to fill in time before your life started.
‘So you’re in Year 12 now?’
‘Last year. I deferred my course.’ I have this friend, you see … ‘I thought, if I have to look at another book I’ll shoot myself.’
There was a knock on the door. ‘Decaffuccino, Mag?’
‘Oh, yes, please!’ Magda began to struggle up.
‘Pay me when I bring it up.’
‘Okay.’ She settled back on to her knees. ‘Good idea, to take a break. See how the world works. Though God knows—’ She glanced all around the room. ‘—this won’t give you much of an idea!’
In the long mirror Chloe looked like a stiff mannequin in her brown-paper bodice and underpants, her hair caught up high out of the way. That was the lot of extras, to stand or mill about, display the costumes and not distract from the main action. She’d been hired for her docility and punctuality, her ability to do a regal walk and sit still; the rest of her didn’t concern the director or anyone else; they didn’t want to know anything about her unless it was likely to get in the way of the production. It was relaxing, to be used like this.
Magda shot the papered bodice a look in the mirror from hip height. ‘Good-o.’ Her knees clicked as she stood up and put aside the extra pins. ‘Not that James won’t change his mind fifty zillion times before we finish. You’ll probably end up swinging upside down in a green furry bodysuit at the premiere.’ She adjusted the bodice at the back of the neck. ‘They using your hair?’
‘They’re augmenting it,’ said Chloe.
‘They want it big, huh?’
‘Big and blonde. Like a cheerleader.’
Magda laughed. ‘Now that would be avant-garde. You should suggest it to James. Ha! I can just see his face, can’t you?’
‘Yeah—“Get back in your box, you!” ’
Magda chuckled and began to unpin the back.
‘Here’s the man!’ Chloe heard Nick yell, opening the door.
‘Mate!’ Isaac yelled back in his deep, cracked voice.
‘Maa-ate! Maa-ate!’ they brayed at each other, laughing.
From the top of the stairs Chloe saw Dane and then Joy hug Isaac. ‘The prodigal returns! Look at you! You look great!’ said Joy. ‘Tanned and all!’
Isaac put an arm around Pete. ‘And you’ve done a beanstalk on me.’
Pete grinned in embarrassment.
‘Six months is a long time when you’re his age,’ said Dane.
Isaac looked up at Chloe with leftover smile on his face. ‘Chloe.’
‘Hi, Isaac. Cool glasses.’ They were new—the usual thick lenses in heavy black circular frames fastened visibly with tiny silver screws. Should she kiss his cheek or hug him? Everyone else seemed to be all over him like a rash. She held back on the bottom stair, staying slightly taller than him.
‘You like ’em?’ He blinked self-consciously.
She nodded. ‘Nice.’ His skin was really clear, if a little rumpled by scars; Chloe felt as if she could actually see him. Also it was startling that he had a presence, suddenly amplified—was he actually bigger?—after being a series of flat picture-cards winging through the post. Now he was person-sized and three-dimensional again. He had real eyes, ears, mouth, hands, that he had taken all around the world, and a bunch of exotic overseas memories filed away inside that head.
‘So. You brought some photos?’ Dane said, and everyone moved towards the lounge room.
Joy hung back and hissed at Chloe, ‘Go get some of that fizzy stuff out of the fridge.’
‘It’s only Isaac, Mum,’ Chloe muttered. Joy gave her a look and she went.
‘That’s Gilbert. He drove us around,’ Isaac was saying when she returned, as Dane looked through a packet of photographs.
‘You mean, “He was our chauffeur,”’ said Nick. ‘It’s okay, Zack, we don’t mind being poor.’
‘Get off his back; he’s just being polite,’ said Joy.
‘This is in Connecticut still.’
‘Lovely countryside.’ Joy craned over Nick’s broad shoulder. Pete hung over the back of the couch between Isaac and Dane, his dark hair flopping into his eyes.
Chloe sat by the fire on a footstool and watched them, her family at rest. She liked them best like this, with one or two people visiting. A whole roomful was hard to keep track of, but with one or two you could follow the conversation, and note each person’s contribution to it.
‘Whip through these; they’re just note-taking, for uni,’ Isaac was saying.
‘Lovely rivets,’ chirped Pete.
‘They are, actually—oh, you were joking.’ Isaac glanced at Chloe and gave a mechanical fake laugh. ‘I’d forgotten about jokes, after six months with my parents and their friends. Thank you.’ He accepted a drink from Joy.
‘Here’s to your return, Isaac,’ she said. ‘We’ve missed you.’
‘Yeah, the place’s been real quiet without you,’ said Nick, propping his feet on the coffee-table. ‘No one swinging on the chandeliers, no one sliding down the banisters singing Mary Poppins songs.’
‘No farting competitions in the cubby,’ Pete contributed, then hid his face in his orange juice.
Isaac sat deadpan among these lies. Chloe watched him for a reaction and caught a minuscule flash of amusement behind the bottle-bottom lenses. ‘When you’re all finished,’ he said, sitting forward. ‘Are you finished? Can we be serious now?’
‘We’re never serious,’ said Chloe. ‘It’s a point of pride.’
Isaac raised his glass and began, ‘You-all may not’ve noticed my absence—’
Nick screeched an imaginary bow across some violin strings. Joy said, ‘Oh, Isaac.’
Isaac silenced them with a hand. ‘—but I’ve certainly noticed not being here every Sunday and four or five evenings in between.’
‘Hey, this is a real-for-true speech,’ said Pete.
‘Thanks, Nick, for all those tasteless postcards, and Joy, for all those little notes keeping me up to date. And Pete, for your Finnish letter—I appreciate the … the hard work that went into it.’
‘He actually got that sent off, did he?’ said Chloe, then went quiet. Isaac turned from Pete to her and she knew what was coming. She screwed up her face.
‘And thank you, Chloe, for your usual enigmatic silence—’
‘I wrote heaps, actually; I just didn’t get around to sending it.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Dane and Nick at once.
‘Sorry, Isaac.’
‘It’s okay. The wound will heal in time.’ He waved his glass around at all of them. ‘It’s good to be back.’
‘Good to have you back, mate,’ said Dane, and they all clinked glasses and drank.
Janey stood at Chloe’s door against a burst of winter-morning sun. She stumped in. ‘You didn’t tell me.’ She threw herself onto the couch, stared accusingly at Chloe.
‘What. Cuppa?’
‘Yer. About the Jerry Street Child Care Centre.’ Having made her entrance, Janey hoisted herself up and followed Chloe into the kitchen’s harsher acoustics. She was all black-legginged legs, with a tiny snarled black jumper like a wisp of some kind of mould around he
r shoulders and arms.
‘What about it?’
‘It’s two doors away.’
‘They make a racket, do they?’
Janey went to the fridge and stared in. ‘Yes, well, it depends which way the wind blows. Like the trains, you know. But on a lovely, sunny day like today they’re all out, and it’s like … I don’t know, it’s like—’ she closed the fridge door and leaned one hip against the bench ‘—some terrible old movie, you know?’
Chloe laughed. ‘Which terrible old movie?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, one where, you know, his true love’s died—maybe he’s murdered her, himself—and he walks away and there’s the sound of children playing and the tissues come out all over the cinema—’
‘Everyone “blubbing”—’
‘Yeah. Like that. It’s awful, just the noise of them. It gets to me.’
Chloe’s eyes roved to the calendar. Janey saw, and squinted at it too. ‘What is it—the seventh? Oh. Well, at least there’s a reason why I feel awful.’
‘Dumped,’ said Chloe, ‘by a wave of hormones.’
‘I still do feel awful, though. Really black. Everything seems like a bad idea.’
‘Even coming round here?’
‘Yeah. Dumping my hormones on you again.’
‘Better than sitting at home blaming yourself for them.’
‘It feels better, now. In the end, though …’
‘In the end, though, it is better.’ Chloe crossed the kitchen and put her arms around her.
Janey’s hair, as she laid her head on Chloe’s shoulder, crunched lightly like steel wool. ‘I hate myself,’ she said feebly.
‘No, you don’t. Why would you? None of this is your fault.’
‘It all is.’
‘Yeah, like what?’ Chloe stood back, gripping and shaking her.
‘Being stupid, getting pregnant. You know, if I hadn’t, if I’d—I dunno—got the morning-after pill, that one time, I could stand … things wouldn’t get to me like they do.’ She wiped her nose on the wrist of her jumper, blinked aside at the floor.
‘Who knows?’ said Chloe. ‘I can’t say it’s not true, can I? But who knows? Who knows it isn’t keeping you as settled as you are now, having him in the world? Just knowing he’s alive.’
Janey tipped her head back, searched the ceiling through tears as if a rope-ladder might swing down to save her. ‘Just knowing he’s alive sends me crrrazy! That sweet little …’ She began to crumble. ‘Off away there!’
‘Yes! And he came from you, the sweetest part of you, that mothering bit you talk about. Just … the one that buys him Duplo, and Wibbly Pig books. That kid bit of you, from before. From when it was okay with you.’
‘Oh, it was never okay!’
‘It was too. You can’t tell me. I was there.’
‘But now! I can’t handle it!’
‘You can. You do, and you’ll go on doing.’
‘Yeah? Will I? How?’
‘One—way—or—another,’ Chloe insisted.
Janey gave a pained laugh and broke away to collapse at the table. Chloe made the coffee and put it down beside Janey’s snaggly head. ‘You want to come into town? Just for the heck of it? Just to get away from the happy children playing?’
The snaggles nodded.
Under the Queen Victoria Building, in a shop-lit warm fug of people and food smells, Janey walked upright, glaring straight ahead; Chloe went beside, not quite as tall as Janey, and attuned to every glance their way, every muttered remark as they passed. God, who’d wanna look like that? Check out the hair. Aw, yuk.
Some boys up ahead were bellowing—no, it was just one of them, enjoying his new deep voice. He fell silent midbellow, and Chloe saw him, and thought he looked familiar. Yes, he must be, she thought, catching his stricken glance at Janey. She felt the crucial moment pass when he decided not to shout something; she saw him suck the words back into his mouth. He huddled with his friends, who were not familiar to Chloe, and glanced out from among them, chin up to cover his fear—fear of Janey, of whatever she’d done to him. Jumped on top of him, probably, made him come too quickly. Chloe couldn’t work it out, how these little street rats could have such buckets of pride, still, that they were threatened by Janey’s jolly fucking, by having to do it her way. She was so amiable, so harmless, really. It was funny to know that and to see this guy shrinking into his group, terrified she might nail him again with his mates watching—his mates, who were shouting ‘Hey, Morticia!’, and falling about at their own wit.
Janey didn’t seem to even notice them. ‘Let’s go up the art gallery,’ she said. ‘I don’t really feel like shops. Is it school holidays or something? There seem to be a pile of kids around.’
‘No, these are just your regular delinquents, cluttering up the pavement when they should be in school,’ said Chloe, with the conscious self-righteousness of the new Year 12 graduate.
Janey in the gallery coffee shop, surrounded by rinsed perms, handbags and a few dapper suits, stirred a cappuccino and stared out at the docks. ‘Everything looks like artworks when you’ve been around the gallery, doesn’t it?’
Chloe glanced over her shoulder at the grey-variant slabs of water, warship, warehouse and dockside machinery.
‘That’s what I like,’ Janey went on. ‘It wakes up your eyes. It’d wake up your hands, too, if you could only touch a few things.’
‘You are so selfish, Jane,’ said Chloe severely. ‘How will the Australians of 2596 be able to enjoy their heritage if your sticky fingerprints have eaten it all away?’
‘Let ’em make their own,’ said Janey, still staring out, eating a spoonful of froth. Her lipstick had worn away in the middle, showing the rawer pink of her lips, glistening more lively than the dark-painted rim. It felt rude to look at it; Chloe fixed on Janey’s eyes instead, but the paint wasn’t perfect there, either, and she could see Janey’s eyes naked beneath it, the stream of her thoughts, the brush and twitch of her lashes as the eyes moved along the docks, into the sky.
‘When is that woman coming with our cakes?’ Chloe said, as an excuse to look away.
‘Person,’ said Janey automatically.
‘She was a woman, though!’
‘They might send a man, though.’
‘What’s this, anticipatory non-sexism?’
‘You got it.’ Janey grinned and sipped experimentally. Then she looked around the coffee shop for the first time, balefully, licking froth from her nude lips. ‘None of these people are artists.’
‘Artists can’t afford to do morning tea. They have to stay in their studios and slave away while the light’s good.’
The light was feeble, wintry. Janey’s stirring hand looked sculpted. Chloe could identify at least seven levels of light, shade and reflected light among the fingers, and down the cushioned outer side of it to the wrist. They changed, flitted away, affixed themselves in different ways to different things as if they were the living things—like Peter Pan’s shadow—not the objects, bodies, movements that interrupted the light.
‘I’ve got it too,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘An attack of artist’s eyes.’ Chloe stared as if mesmerised at the spoon cavity in Janey’s foam.
‘Don’t worry.’ Janey patted her hand. ‘It’ll go away, in time.’
It was Sunday at Chloe’s place, with all Joy and Dane’s friends, and Janey and Isaac. Chloe sat between her mother and Joy’s old friend Carl, her attention drifting as they dissected people from their past she didn’t know.
She heard Isaac getting passionate at the far end of the table. ‘… I mean, you build people these little Toytown apartments to live in, and they’ll start having play lives. Tack on all the tack, all the latticed balconies, the cute little bargeboards, the roof ornaments—and the lives inside will start fitting into these prettified boxes. You live in that kind of space, you end up thinking that’s the only space you deserve. And it’s bad for the people outside, too. When the
se things stop being eyesores and start being invisible because they’re so familiar, I think everyone should start to worry about what’s happening to us inside, to our eyes, to our minds. Why accept it now, when we didn’t accept it when it first went up? We saw then that it was wrong and ugly, and it’s still wrong and ugly. I think we should go on wincing.’
‘Maintain the wince,’ said Maurice, reaching for his wineglass. He nudged Jube next to him, who was talking to Dane. ‘Did you hear that, Jube? Isaac says we should keep letting our morning walks be spoiled every time we pass “Ashdene” and “Bellamy Towers”.’
‘He does?’ Jube looked mystified.
‘You should,’ said Isaac. ‘For the good of humankind.’
Maurice smiled benevolently at him. ‘For our collective consciousness’s sake. Very well, I shall.’
‘Bingo—another convert,’ said Nick, who was stretched out behind them in a lounge chair.
‘Nick’s still holding out on me,’ Isaac explained to Maurice. ‘I’m nearly there, but the lure of the quick buck is pretty strong.’
‘Just as a means of supporting those few fantastic touch-earth-lightly-type commissions, if you know what I mean,’ said Nick.
‘But if we only do the kind of work we can stand to do, that we feel should be done, we’ll have a clear profile, we’ll get a reputation, and more of that work’ll come our way.’
‘… do you, Chloe?’ Carl poked Chloe’s arm, and laughed at her blank look.
‘Sorry? I was dreaming. Do I what?’
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