'What was he like?' Lena asks.
'Oh tall, good-looking, Canadian. He had these huge calf muscles from hiking. We did it on the kitchen table and afterwards he cooked me eggs and baked beans. But now I've got cystitis, damn it. Why do women always have to pay for it somehow or other?'
'Do you want some cranberry juice?' says Lena. 'Four out of ten women get cystitis frequently from sustained sexual activity. You should always pee straight after sex.'
'I know that,' sniff s Doreen, who is in charge of one hundred and six nurses. 'Where's the cranberry juice?'
At home, the silence in the house is appalling. I try to think of all the women I know who live alone, and those thousands of millions I don't know. Doreen, Rita, Maria . . . The last time I saw her, Maria declared she didn't believe in marriage any more, only the nomadic life.
Yesterday when I walked up to the shops I tried to think how lucky I am to live so close to all these amenities, that I have enough money in my wallet to buy groceries, that I have my health, and live in a peaceful country. I thought of Doreen buying her Thai takeaway and Maria on her travels. They are happy and appreciate their luck. They didn't lose a limb when they lost a husband, they don't hobble anywhere. I felt the sun on my face as I stood outside the butcher's. It was gentle, soothing like valium. Why can't I be like them?
When I got home with my one bread roll and milk carton and packet of tea, Doreen rang to say that we must get ourselves organised. The planet, and Rita, needed us. She said Rita had joined a new group called Climate Coolers – The Hottest Women on the Planet. Rita reckons that if we wait around for men to fix global warming, we'll all fry. What did I think of the name, catchy, hey? Would I want to help with the campaign? 'It's about reducing carbon emissions in our own lives,' Doreen explained. 'We're aiming to get a million women to cut a million tonnes of CO2. And that's just a start!' The text had been written already, but perhaps, they thought, I could do some editing? Doreen sounded energised herself, glowing with enthusiasm like one of those low-carbon-emitting light bulbs the Climate Coolers were promoting. She got me excited too, even though I worried I'd ever be able to understand the complicated intricacies of carbon emission, let alone clarify the idea for others. But I told her I'd like to help and we agreed to speak again soon.
I was still standing in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil when Rita rang. 'Doreen just told me!' she exclaimed. 'Oh Rachel, I'm so glad you want to be involved.' Her voice had little gasps of excitement in it. 'You never would have said yes before. I know, because I wouldn't have either. But you'll see, it feels wonderful when you can choose your own projects and use your own time how you want and no one's making you feel guilty for neglecting them or telling you that protecting the environment is bad economics or asking where's my dinner or why haven't you washed those shirts today? And it's so important – it's about our children's future, isn't it. Look at this government, protecting the coal industry instead of our grandchildren! Did you know, Australia is the biggest polluter per capita in the world?'
I told her yes, I'd read that and been filled with shame. It was a familiar emotion. 'Let's get together next week,' I suggested. 'And Lena too, if she's interested?'
'Oh yes,' said Rita. 'Her publisher is doing a new book on carbon emissions. Imagine – a million tonnes of CO2 is enough to fill 2.3 billion big wheelie bins.'
I didn't know quite what to do with that fact, but I tried to hold it in my mind for a while before I went to lie down on the sofa.
The dark has thickened while I've been lying here. I've done this every night for a month, throwing myself down like a towel. Why don't you throw IN the towel? says the voice. What's the point of you? Good moments pass straight through me like the radiator heat through the fibro walls. I think about turning on the television news, something I've done each night since Guido left , but I can't concentrate. I've even switched to Clara's awful American sitcoms but I can't seem to understand what's funny and on my worst nights all that canned laughter seems directed at me.
So I lie on the sofa, looking at the screen in my mind, changing channels. I'm trying to find a story that will make sense. Every morning I wake on fire with fear, jolting into the day with the awareness that something terrible has occurred. Alone! the voice reminds me. Your marriage has failed! The silence is so thick I can hear my own breathing. No one is alive in the next room wanting coffee, or breakfast, or more cigarettes. No one knows if I am alive or dead.
Mum was up today. She was watering the indoor plants, the palm and the maiden hair. She seemed almost content, humming as she watched the water being absorbed, trickling out into the black ceramic saucer. Just for a second, when I was telling her about reheating the pie I'd made for her and Dad, she stopped and became still, looking lost as if she didn't know where she was. 'Shepherd's pie?' she said. 'Who's Shepherd?' Then she seemed to recover and nodded knowingly, giving a little laugh at herself, but in a compassionate way. I wondered if having a foreign object in your heart might let you off the hook somewhat. 'You're a person with a pacemaker now,' you could tell yourself, 'so be gentle.'
Just before I left , my mother asked me how I was coping, so she must have remembered about Guido. When she first heard the news she said, 'Thank god!' just like Doreen, which annoyed me. Even my father pretty quickly started to point out all the things I could do with my life now that I was 'my own mistress'. What is that, a woman who's gone to all the trouble of dressing up in black lacy panties and a suspender belt with no one to admire her? But Dad was just trying to be positive, so I didn't reply. I nodded and smiled and gave unnecessary instructions about the dinner. Really, the ubiquity of this ecstatic reaction to my separation is so painful – it makes me feel like a person with a developmental disorder who has finally learnt to tie her shoelaces. It's only taken her twenty years, I can just hear them saying.
And no one knows the worst of it. That when I come home I rush at the answering machine like an alcoholic to the bottle. I press the flashing red button before I throw off my shoes or have a much-needed pee. Maybe Guido has rung, I hope wildly, maybe he's realised that life without me is hollow and meaningless and colder than any winter scene he could describe in his poems. Maybe he sees now that family is just as important as literature and he's bought plane tickets for us to go to Italy to visit our daughter. He wants to be with me forever. He is transformed with love. I check the machine every hour or so, even when I'm at home. I check it after I've been outside watering the plants, or in the bathroom – maybe I didn't hear the phone ring, due to the flush, the shower, the voice. Why did I push him away? Who else in this world has ever touched me the way he has, given himself to me, given me a child? What was it all for, all those years, if we stop now? He told me he needed to come first with me, but did I help him with his poetry after we were married? No, you didn't make the effort, you lazy bitch.
I think of ringing him fifty times a day. But I'm too much of a coward. I couldn't bear to hear the slam of his voice. The Door of Death.
It's all right for women like Doreen and Maria. They return to their own lives as if it's a good thing. They do it with joy, look forward to having 'time to themselves'. But they don't have to return to being me. They don't have to return to the voice. Doreen just doesn't get it, no matter what I say. She's always telling me what I should feel, like Guido, like my mother. 'You should be pleased that you can change that light bulb in the hall,' said Mum when I was eleven. 'You should be excited that you understand how electricity works!' 'You should be happy that you're married to me!' said Guido. 'You should be happy now that you're free!' said Doreen. And in fact, I'm free AND I know how to change a light bulb AND I'm financially independent AND I have my health. But I'm not happy.
From the sofa I can see the moonlight shimmering on the pool. The filter pump is still going, making the light twirl among the ripples. I must have forgotten to turn the pump off this afternoon. What an environmental delinquent you are! Call yourself a Climate Cooler? I get up
and trudge down the back stairs, reaching under the house for the pump switch. Something hairy runs lightly over my hand, making me jerk back with fright.
I thump down on the dirt. The ground is a cold shock and tears loom. I want to howl about those hairy legs brushing against my hand and how much I hate living with the voice and there's no point to me being alive now that there's nobody to look after, and everything is flat and shapeless and frightening and I don't think I can stand another minute of this endless suburban lawn of myself rolling out for all eternity, tidied at the edges to resemble normal lawns but lying poisoned like something nuked, a half-life creature clinging on until the darkness of space at the end of the universe swallows us all.
The house next door is only two metres away and now that nice family have come outside to eat dinner in the garden. They don't know that on the other side of the fence there sits a middle-aged woman sitting on the dirt crying about hairy legs. Huntsman spiders can't hurt you, they're just doing their job like you should be. Simon says he wants to fix the timer on the pump so I won't have to grope around in the dark any more. He doesn't say if you weren't so forgetful you wouldn't have to come out here at night, anyway. Or, you don't deserve a pool full of precious water when seventy-five per cent of the world doesn't even have a house with clean water to drink! He doesn't say it, but I bet he thinks it, doesn't he? Simon, with his poor dead wife from Tanzania and his politically active daughter. I bet he's seen real poverty. Real misery.
Simon has dropped in twice this week. He filled one of those little test tubes with pool water to test for chlorine. He's like a doctor with that pool, examining, running tests, medicating. He asks after my mother. I ask if he wants a cup of tea. We don't normally sit down for tea. We talk standing up. When there's a pause he says, 'Well, better keep going', but then he asks another question about how my books are going or the peculiar facts in them and he stands on the concrete path a little longer.
'Guido's left me,' I told him on the second visit. He'd just been saying, 'Well, better keep going.' Both his feet were already pointing towards the gate but at my announcement his face swung around, towards me. His neck went red.
'Do you want a cup of tea?' I asked.
We sat outside at the old wooden table beside the pool. It seemed more fitting, casual, sitting near his line of work. It would be too strange and formal inside. You wouldn't dare, the house looks like a hurricane hit it.
Well, he didn't want to come in. 'No, no, my dirty shoes . . . ' he said vaguely when I gestured inside. But he seemed to want to know about Guido. So I told him about Guido's film script and about his poetry before that and the mosaics and his strategies for getting in touch with his unconscious . . . I told him quite a lot, actually, probably more than I ever have in all the time I've known him. I don't know what came over me. Maybe it was his face, just listening, not saying anything. 'Thanks for the tea,' he said, 'that's the best cup I've had all day.' He pressed my arm when he left . 'If there's anything I can do.' His fingers were warm.
It was only afterwards that I thought, my misery must be nothing to his pain when his wife died. I should have asked him about that, or at least referred to it humbly. But I didn't think of it.
It is almost completely dark in the living room now. A street light comes on outside. I look at my legs in the dark, just shapes without detail. Better that way. I have wrinkles even on my knees. Guido's olive skin is smooth, only one small line between his brows. Maybe if I find the courage to ring him and arrange to meet, I could tell him that I want things to be different, that I've understood, finally, what he wants, that we'll look at his script together, I understand how important it is to him now, that I understand him. Which you don't, of course, you're just lying as usual because you're desperate.
But he's living with Silvia in her one-bedroom apartment in the city. It's only a few streets away from the Capitol Theatre, on the seventeenth floor, which is a 'sure sign of rightful destiny'. Guido's stars, apparently, forecast this address. Silvia is a Cancer, which is a nurturing sign, unlike Libra which is all about selfish pragmatism and balance. There is a voluptuous fountain in the lobby and a pink marble floor like a 1940s film set. He tells me about his living quarters as if I'm a kindly real estate agent he once had dealings with. Or maybe, like a child telling his news to his mother. 'In our apartment there is a little camera you can look into when the bell rings from downstairs, is fantastic! You can see exactly who is it before you answer, or maybe you don even look at all. I can write all day and not be interrupted. Then at night, just downstairs, there is the city, people in the streets, restaurants, music, life!' Our apartment.
'I go to live with Silvia, she believes in me,' Guido told me on the phone, as if he were one of his own illusions. Like a god. Perhaps because his voice was disembodied, the sliding sensation came and tipped me into a sudden cloud of unreality. Did he think he was a god? Did I? Did Guido want an audience, or maybe a faithful assistant? But I could be that, I was that, wasn't I? Not in the full-time way he required, I suppose. I didn't say anything more so he put the phone down. I listened to the dial tone for a while, imagining Silvia coming home from work, making his dinner, reading the words he'd written that day, translating perfectly, praising his language, sitting close, stroking his hair. But no, that was wrong, they would go out for dinner, downstairs where there was music, and life!
You didn't believe in him, says the voice. You lacked faith and commitment. You can't keep a man. You are selfish. You failed.
Chapter 21
'Where do you think the voice comes from?' asked the therapist last week. 'You weren't born with the voice, were you?'
It was something to think about. Especially sitting here in the dark, night after night, where it can be as loud and alarming as a siren. I have never talked about the voice with anyone. Sometimes I think everyone must have it, and other times I think nobody is as mad or bad as me. I remember the voice ever since I can remember anything. The therapist asks uncomfortable questions. But her voice is not uncomfortable. It rumbles often with laughter. Her voice has music in it, high, bright notes as well as soft , low ones. 'If there's no music, then life is just a bunch of dates by which the bills are paid,' I said last week, quoting Frank Zappa. She laughed, 'I like that!' The therapist asks questions, but she doesn't give the answers. Her face is like a cloudless day, without judgement. But is that possible? Isn't there some kind of god sitting on his throne in her sky, wanting his dinner?
I tell her about the dreams I'm having. When I start talking, they recede and almost disappear, as if they never existed. I try to hang on, bits of dream in my teeth. I see Clara, fragile flesh, things that shatter but don't bend. Or mend. My mermaid dolls grow legs, Sasha screams out loud, devoured by sharks. Once, there was blood dripping through the ceiling. My parents couldn't work out where all that blood was coming from. They weren't concerned, just irritated by the mess. My father called in the plumber, who was Simon, and he led us all up into the attic to show us where the trouble lay. There was Danny, bleeding from a hole in his head. 'You wouldn't think a guy could have so much blood in him,' Simon said. 'Well, better keep going.'
It was quiet in the room after that. The therapist nodded. She held my gaze as if it were something important, but not burdensome.
'Tell me about Danny,' she said.
In her mouth his name sounded more ordinary. For a moment she was holding him with me and the clouds lift ed a little. I told her about the clouds and she smiled. 'Tell me about Danny,' she said again.
He was a hard worker, I told her. It was a few weeks after my tenth birthday that Dad brought him home. Danny was courteous, bony, fifteen. He'd run away from a foster home where he'd been abused, Dad said, and he'd been living for a year on the streets of Kings Cross. He slept under awnings of city shops and squatted in a condemned terrace. I remembered looking at Danny's knees. I thought they must really ache after all that squatting and wondered if he was training to be some kind of gymnast or maybe t
here was just something wrong in his head after all he'd been through.
For all his hard living he had kept himself neat. In the airways bag he brought with him he had two shirts, a little frayed around the cuffs but carefully preserved with the collars held in place by plastic moulds. He was certainly an 'original', as my father fondly described him. A good boy.
'Were you fond of him?' the therapist asked.
'I should have been,' I said. 'What was there not to like? Well, at first, anyway.'
'Go on,' she said, as if she really wanted to hear.
Danny was eager to please. He was excessively polite and had the manners of a helpful shop assistant. His sharp, clean features and round blue eyes set far apart gave him an innocent, slightly surprised expression. I was confused by Danny. No other boy had ever acknowledged my existence, let alone paid me any particular attention. But Danny asked me how my day was, if I'd enjoyed my afternoon with Joanna. He made me uneasy. Something in his face. Whenever he talked to me he never looked me in the eye and he wore a far-off expression as if he was having another conversation deep inside himself.
It was endearing the way he enthused about the bathroom and the taps that worked and the instant hot water. I noticed he washed his hands before and after eating. He reminded me of the doctors scrubbing up at the hospital, the way he soaped up to his elbows each time. When he put out the rubbish for Mum he wore washing-up gloves. For a job interview at Woolworths, Dad gave him shoe polish and a brush, and Danny polished the soles as well. He seemed to need to do these things without being hurried and he looked more peaceful once they were finished. I instinctively understood Danny's need to perform these rituals, and certainly, as Dad said, such careful hygiene hurt no one, but as I watched him I felt prickles of fear.
As well as needing to be clean, Danny depended upon a reliable routine. Usually Mum arrived home at five o'clock to cook, I set the table and we all had dinner at six. Danny took over my job and as he put the last serviette down and the salt and pepper shakers dead in the centre, he'd call 'Ready!' It would be exactly six o'clock. Somehow the family just seemed to obey, and upon his call Mum would bring the meal over to the table. A bit like cattle, we were corralled by Danny's needs around the table.
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