Just talking about it gave me a hollow, sick feeling in my stomach. I snatched up one of the tools. 'What pick is this?' I said, waving it playfully in the air.
'Half diamond,' she said.
'And when do we use it?'
'First stage.'
'Hmm?'
'We insert the pick into the keyway of the cylinder,' she sighed, 'until the tip stops at the back of the plug. Then we lift the pins as high as possible. Satisfied?'
I flung my arm around her and gave her shoulder a squeeze. 'That's my clever girl!'
'Oh, Mum,' she said, 'I'm twenty-one!' She wriggled out of my embrace. 'Why couldn't you have given me a wallet, or one of those suitcases with wheels that you pull along behind you? Doreen gave Saraah one when she went to Europe. She said it was great, made travelling a breeze.'
That's when I got up and went to the library. At least Clara was able to be open with me, I thought, as I gathered up my keys – she was able to say what she felt about the gift . I couldn't have done that with my mother. But really, if I'm honest, that's about all there is. I've been a pretty lousy mother, and wife. Guido says that's why Clara never worked hard at school. She resisted acquiring any extra knowledge because she got too much of it at home. He says I'm ossessiva. That she is going away for a year so she can breathe.
'You want her to be exactly like you,' he claims. He looks at me, lifting his left eyebrow in that withering way he has. Clara practised the lone eyebrow lift for the whole of third grade before she gave up. These facial acrobatics are genetic, I told her, and unfortunately, she was stuck with mine. I explained that the single raised eyebrow is in the same class as rolling up your tongue or whistling through your teeth. She didn't want to hear. My father can do all these things, she kept crying, so why can't I? Clara didn't inherit her father's dark good looks – his olive skin, his liqueur chocolate eyes, his tall, slender build. I wish she had. Instead she is all her mother, both of us red-haired, pale and soft as pears.
To me it is laughable, the idea that I would want Clara to be like me. Well, laughable in a mirthless, tragic way. If only he knew, if only they both knew how much I'd wanted the very opposite! Christ, who would want to be me? When I was talking on the phone to Doreen the other day, I'd mentioned how I felt about our 'Last Supper' with Clara. I was trying to make a joke of it but my voice wobbled. When Guido heard me he yelled at me to settle, stop it! He is very superstitious. I know he is just as anxious about her as I am, although he would never admit it, because that might mean a conversation.
I open the red wine and add a generous slurp to the baking dish. Perhaps I'll pour a glass for me too. 'And what about Simmo,' I say, 'did he come?'
'Seemmo? What kind of name is that?'
'You know, the pool man, Simon, the one who's been coming here for the last three years when something goes wrong. The pool filter's not working.'
'Can't you fix it?'
'No, I've tried. I'm not Wonder Woman.'
There is a snicker of agreement from behind the desk. It's probably the only thing we've agreed on for the last ten years.
'We never use the pool, anyway,' says Guido. 'Why do we need to spend all this money?'
'Because it will go green and slimy with algae if it's left to itself. Mosquitoes will breed and it'll be a health hazard.' I shove another garlic clove into the soft flesh of the veal. 'Heavens, listen to us, how self-indulgent are we, complaining about the cost of our swimming pool when two-thirds of the people in the world have never even had the chance to use a telephone?'
'Well, now I remember. That man Seemmo just suddenly appeared at the window this afternoon. I wish you would tell me when 'e is coming. Nearly gave me an infarto . . .'
Guido goes on to say something else but I'm thinking about Simmo. Simon Mason. I like his hands, big square fingers, his nails cut short, skin roughened at the tips by pool chemicals, weather and work. How peaceful it is when he explains the balance of things, the need for equal parts of acid and alkali, strategies to reduce chlorine consumption and algae growth. You can't afford any compassion for algae, he said once. But his face looked sorry.
'The plumber said the flush is fixed but 'e doesn't like the way the water is filling up the bowl. Is still not at a good level. But 'e could not stay, 'e was sorry, there was the funeral of his sister's wife.'
'Husband.'
'Yes. So 'e said 'e would come back tomorrow to finish the job, which is not at all convenient for me, but that man Seemmo said he could take a look at it while 'e was 'ere, if I wanted. Said it would be free of charge, so I told 'im yes, why not?'
I can't help smiling. That's typical of Simon. So helpful, and at the end of the afternoon when all he probably wanted to do was go home and put his feet up. Sometimes we've sat out on the porch after he's fixed the filter or cleared a hose and I've made a cool drink. I feel more relaxed just thinking about it.
Guido comes into the kitchen. 'Did you buy anything for me to snack on before dinner? I ham so 'angry. That Seemmo knows a lot about us – 'e knew Clara was going to Italy tomorrow. Do you tell the garbage men all our business, too?'
I don't bother replying, handing him some cheese and crackers from the fridge. He wrinkles his nose in a bewildered way as the fridge door opens and closes. I take a deep breath and hold it, then open the fridge for the butter. Propped right next to it is my hairbrush. God! Quickly, in a sleight-of-hand move, I whip out the butter tub, flourishing it in front of Guido's face while I slip the brush into my apron pocket. There! I feel pleased for a moment at my expert misdirection, but really, this kind of thing is happening far too frequently. I just don't seem capable of concentrating.
For instance, I find it almost impossible to sit still and do my work. The book I am contracted to write at the moment is entirely different from my others – although because it's about magic, most people wouldn't appreciate that. It's not about illusions, and how to make them. I'm used to talking about misdirection, which is, of course, the fundamental tool of illusion. I must have described a hundred different ways for diverting attention to, say, the left hand – clicking your fingers, pointing, making the shape of a bird – while the right is busy with substitution, coins for feathers, an ace for a king. These are practical steps, made simple for children. Now I have to write a book for grown-ups, about four renowned magicians. I'll have to research them, discover their inner motivations, bring them to life. But I'm stuck at the very beginning, on Harry Houdini, the father of escapology. Harry died at the age of fifty-two from a blow to the stomach, which was a tragedy, but in a sense ensured his immortality. He became a legend, never to be trapped by the slow constrictions of old age like the rest of us. That is, the rest of us in the western world. Just this morning at the library I read that the average life expectancy in Zambia is thirty-seven. Isn't that the sort of thing a person ought to be writing about?
Magic is such a frilly thing, says Clara, a mere accessory to life like a handbag – why don't you write about something important? But I wouldn't know how to write about anything else. I wish I did. I find Harry's life – and death – mesmerising. I just can't move on. The book is a year late and every time I sit down at my desk I think about running away – going to live somewhere else, somewhere anonymous, a cold little mountain village maybe, like the one Guido once wrote about. A place where no publishers would be waiting for manuscripts, no eyes would settle on me as people rushed over cobblestones with coats buttoned up against the cold, noses and mouths forming triangles of ice in the pure, bitter air. Doreen says it's normal at our age to want to escape the lives we've made for ourselves. That's what holidays are for. I told her it's more like life has settled around me, like dust on an ornament. If you stay still for long enough, I said, the dust mats into a film that is impossible to peel away.
Weariness overwhelms me as I look at the pumpkin on the kitchen bench. It's as big as a football. Organic. I'll be making soup for weeks. I start chopping it up, to put in with the veal. My father loves bak
ed vegetables. He'd be a vegetarian if he could. Hates the thought of those poor cows with their big dark eyes walking, trusting as children, to slaughter. The eggplant, capsicum, mushrooms and tomatoes I'll bake separately, as a ratatouille. That's Guido's favourite. Perhaps it will lighten his mood and encourage him to be more loquacious at dinner.
Guido is hovering in the doorway, munching crackers. He seems to have abandoned his work for the moment.
'Here,' I say, 'do you want to give me a hand? All these vegetables have to go into the oven quickly. You could use the new classy knife, you know, the one you admired the other day.' I offer it to him, twirling it like a cheer-leading baton so the bright blue handle catches the light in an appealing way. 'You could help me chop up the pumpkin – it always makes my arm ache.'
Guido frowns. He looks at the knife I push towards him. 'Mm, okay, but I just 'ad a brilliant idea that I should write down before I forget. Is about the slow tide of death, of death as a symbol rather than the physical fact, what I intend is the death of self . . .'
The phone on the kitchen wall rings. I reach for it but Guido is too quick for me.
'Ciao bella!' he says, sudden warmth suffusing his voice. 'Un momento,' and he lays the receiver carefully on the kitchen bench. 'I'll take it in the bedroom,' he whispers to me, 'put it down when you hear me pick up,' and he strides smartly up the hall.
'Hey, what about your idea?' I call, 'you know, about the slow tide of death?' but his door closes with a bang. When I hear voices – Silvia's, I think, his star pupil – I obediently hang up the phone.
In all the years we've been married, I can't remember Guido ever doing something for me at the time I've asked him. Doreen says that men are just like that, it's a control issue: we remind them too much of their mothers so they have to rebel. Well, I don't bother asking for anything any more because it's much faster to do the thing myself, whatever it is. I was always like that with Clara, too, I suppose, and that's why she's never learnt to cook. She said something like that to Saraah the other day: 'I won't be able to get a job in a kitchen. I don't even know how to make scrambled eggs!'
Mothers are supposed to teach their daughters how to cook, said the voice, not how to escape.
I start slicing the skin from the pumpkin. Even with the fancy new knife the skin is so hard you have to put all your shoulder into it. You wouldn't want to miss as the knife comes down. The blade is so sharp. Like death. Not a numbing tide but quick, red. I hope Clara looks both ways when she steps off the kerb in Italy. Will she remember they drive on the right? I flinch as I watch her being mown down by a speeding Fiat.
The front door slams. 'Is that you, Clara?'
'Yeah.'
I pop my head around the kitchen archway to see her wheeling the suitcase up the hall. She grins, pointing at the case. 'Cute, isn't it?' She disappears into her room.
I love her smile. I am smote by her face, so full of light and forgiveness. I hurry to finish peeling the pumpkin and potatoes, chop them up and throw them around the veal, sprinkling olive oil on top. Then I wipe my hands on my apron, rush into my room to get the new book I picked up at Baudelaire's and a few other little last-minute items for her trip, and run down the hall.
Her door is closed. I look at the blank scabby face of the wood and count to ten before I knock. By the time I get to nine maybe I'll know whether to go in. I remember when she first closed her door at thirteen and put a sign on it saying KEEP OUT ON PAIN OF DEATH! It felt as if I'd been kicked in the stomach by a horse. Or what I imagined that would be like. Something with a lot of weight and muscle and hard hoof.
There's no answer, just a loud thud as if something heavy has been dropped, followed by 'Shit!'
I open the door a few centimetres, the book in my hand. 'I've got something for you,' I say, and hold it out.
Clara looks up from the floor where her open suitcase must have fallen, and rolls her eyes at me. 'Don't tell me, it's about Houdini escaping from a burning plane and you want me to learn how to do the trick before dinner.'
I smile back at her, pretending to be amused. Harry did in fact flirt with air travel. He was the first person to fly on the Australian continent. 'She's like a swan,' he said, very poetically I thought, of the French Voisin Biplane, and he wrote to a friend, 'I have been very bisy trying to win the Australian Prize, and I'm pleased to inform you the trophy is MINE!!!' His spelling was his only weakness. Endearing, really.
I hover there, thinking feverishly how to describe Harry's enthusiasm for flying. Clara could take him with her, this picture of him holding his trophy high. She could imagine him, this courageous man with his emotional barometer always set to optimistic, as she took off on her first flight. I stand, bristling with words, my foot in the door.
'Oh Mum, you look like a Mormon with a bible. Put that book down whatever it is and come in then.'
'It's actually an account of his early life,' I say breezily, inching into the room. I deliberately make my voice light because she once told me how much it annoyed her that I reserved a special tone for Him, sort of low and thick and reverent, as if I were in church.
I try to keep my eyes fixed on the window, and not look at the mess of underwear and jeans and oh my god, a balled-up black silk dress lying like a crumpled funnel-web on the floor. Doesn't she know she'll never get the creases out? No, says the voice, because you've always done her ironing for her. I feel the familiar rising panic. She has only an hour before her grandparents arrive and then at dawn practically we'll have to get in the car and drive to the airport. How's she going to have time to prepare for a whole year? The floor is the sea after a shipwreck, odd bits of clothing floating about like severed limbs. The arms of a jumper wrap around an upturned shoe lying on top of a long matt ed woollen cardigan she bought at St Vincent de Paul's at fifteen. God, she's not going to take that horrible old thing? What will the elegant Italians in their velvet smoking jackets think of her?
The Doors are playing on the ghetto-blaster. How she can think with all that screaming, I can't imagine. It's always been like this, homework set to the pace of rock songs. I wouldn't allow it for years but the fights became too wearying, and anyway, by the time kids are in senior school, you're supposed to 'give them their heads', aren't you? What a strange, uneasy expression that is.
'You can't live their lives for them,' says Doreen, wagging her finger at me. 'Overfunctioning mother, underfunctioning daughter.'
And just look at the ironing, says the voice.
I try to find a space on the bed without moving things around too conspicuously. The suitcase lies open at my feet, almost empty. I bump it sideways, just a little, with my foot. On the bed I lay out the things I bought: lip balm and 30+ suncream, she's going into spring and summer there, antibiotic cream for the impetigo she'd had in kindergarten, a lovely jade silk camisole that will bring out her green eyes, a good thick toothbrush, vitamin C.
'Can I help you with anything?' I keep the same light tone.
'No, everything's fine,' Clara says, surveying the devastation of her room. 'See, I'm almost done.'
We stare at each other but then I register the corner of her mouth twisting sideways as she bends to pick up the funnel-web. This is one of those times when I realise that I don't know my daughter – I just don't understand her sense of humour. She can laugh about the most serious, anxiety-making things. Joke. I don't joke very much. Recently I dreamt that I'd lost my sense of humour, which had been wrapped in a small brown paper package. My mother told me she had seen it in a tree and I went to look where she pointed but the package was too high up to fetch. As the parcel had no label, I couldn't tell if it was really mine, so I went home empty-handed.
'I just thought you might want something to read on the plane, sweetheart,' I say. 'Something from home, a familiar face in all that unknown!' I hear a snort from under the bed where she's trying to retrieve a shoe. 'It's a really interesting book, Clara. Gives you such a good picture of Harry when he was your age and just getting
started on his career. Actually, I suppose you wouldn't call it getting started, he was well on his way by your time of life.'
'Yeah, and I'm still fluffing around, is that what you want to say?'
'No, no, of course not.' God. I smile brightly. But all I can think of is Clara's short jabs at careers. She did a year of psychology at university, and pranced around the house with her repressed memory theories and Freudian interpretations. She said we should all loosen up, say what was on our minds. She'd never had a problem with that, I thought privately. When I told her my dream about the cut in the sole of my foot, and how millions of tiny worms were multiplying in there, she made me a cup of tea and patted my knee. 'Freud would say you were really dreaming about your soul,' she said, 'you know, your spirit. He says we disguise our real fears in different ways because they're too painful to confront.' And she drew her eyebrows together, concerned. 'What is festering in there, Mum, in your SOUL?'
I said that was interesting because what Freud described sounded exactly like misdirection, as if our brains unconsciously misdirect our own psyche! Then I told her how Houdini kept a shim in his sole, what did she think of that, but she got irritated with me and stopped patting my knee.
After that first year, Clara never went back to university. I don't really know why. She wasn't good at sticking at things. For another year she worked at Love-in Lingerie with Saraah. Saraah is still there, loving lingerie. Clara said Saraah would have worn her lilac bras and apple-green G-strings on the outside of her clothes, like Superman, if the manager had allowed it. I often wondered how Clara felt about Saraah's long succession of boyfriends. Doreen told me if you lined them up, head to toe, they'd fill a football field. She said that about the large intestine, too.
Oh, Clara. I can hear her teeth tapping. She started that habit at fourteen, and for a while she did it almost every time I began a conversation with her. Once, when I couldn't stand it any more – how rude can you get, I shrilled, when I'm only trying to help you with your homework? – she told me that I should try it, because tooth tapping was a great technique for shutting someone out. If you do it fast enough, she said, you can't hear anything but your own teeth.
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