Tirra Lirra by the River

by Jessica Anderson

  A well-sprung mattress, a modern kitchen, an efficient hot water service. How glad I am that Grace made these concessions to the times. I have had the first before, but never the last two. In the morning I have a bath, long, deep, and forbidden, then put on a warm dressing gown and slippers and go to the kitchen.

  The small pawpaw sent by Arch Cust has arrived at perfect ripeness and infuses the kitchen with its scent. A transverse sun entering the window has flung a lozenge of light on to the table. I carry the pawpaw, on its white plate, and set it down in this light. Memories of Arch make me handle it with a sort of humorous ritual. With deliberation and enjoyment, I shall eat it.

  I cut it in two lengthwise, scoop out the shining black seeds, and bring the first spoonful to my mouth. Without a doubt, it is the most delicious fruit in the world, but like certain little jokes, it ought to be consumed only where it grows. At number six I once described the procreating methods of the male and female trees. How fascinated Fred was. I think he felt it should always be done in that way.

  As my spoon cuts close to the skin (which I am trying, as in childhood, not to break), Lyn Wilmot comes into the kitchen with my pint of milk. She gives a shriek when she sees me.

  ‘Should you be here?’

  ‘Why not? I’m allowed to get up.’

  ‘He said only in a chair.’

  ‘I am in a chair.’

  ‘He didn’t say that kind of chair.’

  And now she wants to bustle me back to bed and wait on me, just as Una Porteous, after I had signed everything and was packing my suitcase, wanted to kiss me and bemoan with me the ‘tragedy’ of divorce.

  I remember to be meek. ‘Doctor Rainbow does let me go to the bathroom.’

  ‘Oh, does he? I didn’t know.’

  ‘But if you really think I shouldn’t be here …’

  ‘Oh no, I suppose it’s all right. He must know what he’s doing. Just because I like Doctor Smith best doesn’t mean I think Doctor Rainbow’s no good. His manner puts me off, that’s what it is. Gives me the creeps. But to be honest, I don’t know if it’s really his manner, or knowing about his mother committing all those murders.’

  I nod without looking up from my pawpaw. My pattern of yesterday was credible after all, but if horrors are to be recounted, I prefer to hear them from Betty or Jack Cust. I fold the unbroken pawpaw skin (as in childhood) like cloth. ‘I wonder if pawpaw is bad for arthritis,’ I say, as I carry the plate to the kitchen bin. ‘I do hope not.’

  I go back to bed. The story of Dorothy Rainbow’s fate having progressed from accident to suicide, and from simple suicide to suicide with murder, it is understandable that by the time Betty Cust arrives my imagination should have supplied a choice of further progressions, so that Betty’s story of the axe, and of Dorothy’s husband and all her children but one, Gordon, killed in their beds, does not really surprise me. One has read of such things. As Betty speaks, she stands as if toeing a line, with both hands pressed to her cheeks and her eyebrows squirming as if in a recreation of bewilderment.

  ‘There was only Gordon. He woke up and saw her, and ran away and hid under the house. There was a big old packing case there, a piano case. The children used to use it for a cubby. He curled up in a corner and pulled cloth and papers over his head. He told them he heard her moving about looking for him, but in the end she went off again. Then he heard her in the house, and after a while everything was quiet, so he crept out and crept back upstairs. But when he saw all the others, and her with her head in the gas oven, he ran off again. They found him the next morning, trying to catch yabbies in an old jam tin in the creek behind the school. They asked him why he hadn’t run for the police, but he was only eight.’

  ‘Could anyone else have been saved if he had?’

  ‘No. Only her.’

  ‘Poor child.’

  ‘Oh, yes!’

  I have heard the story, I have accepted the facts, so why should shock come now like a wall collapsing. ‘But,’ I say, ‘an axe!’

  ‘Nora, I know. None of us ever, ever, understood how she could do it.’

  I feel the imminence of an angry speech. ‘If one of you had, she may not have done it.’ I am glad I suppressed it. What reason have I to suppose that anyone could have stemmed a tide of that sort?

  ‘She was so gentle,’ says Betty.

  ‘She was anxious to please, I remember that. She can’t have been gentle.’

  ‘Gentle when she was her true self.’

  ‘Perhaps when she was one of her true selves. But how many selves did she have? And how many of those selves did her life call upon? We can only know this—one of them was not gentle.’

  ‘That one never showed. Truly, Nora, never. She did have a sort of a breakdown just before the war. But nothing violent. Only refusing to leave the house, and hiding when anyone knocked. You know the kind of thing?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know the kind of thing.’

  ‘Nowadays they call it suburban neurosis. But in those days there were plenty of people who said she needed a good slap, or that she ought to have something real to worry about. Still, others recognised it as a sickness, and she did have treatment, sedatives and things. She always said it was Grace who pulled her out of it in the end. When the war started Grace took her to the Red Cross, and wouldn’t let her give up when she wanted to. And she did get to love it, Nora. Truly. I’ve never known anyone work so hard. She was tireless.’

  I find nothing to say that can be said. Betty gets my breakfast, but I can’t eat it. ‘I am so cross with Lyn Wilmot,’ she says. She attributes my fatigue and lack of appetite to the revelation of Dorothy Rainbow’s tragic end. She does not know, of course, about my rashness in having had that long bath.

  It is Saturday, and after Betty goes I lie and wonder if noises sound so clear and isolated because it is not a working day, or because I know it is not a working day. I move my lips and hear myself say again, ‘But an axe!’ And this time I recognise that part of my shock was caused by the ugly grisly method. Poison or bullets, equally deadly and perhaps slower, would not have shocked me so much. The axe is an offence, evidently, against the aesthetics of murder. Though disgusted by this evidence of my own wincing ‘good taste’, I am not surprised. For a long time I have been critical of this one of my many selves, this sickly and over-fastidious creature, and indeed I have often wondered what effect it has had on my life. And though by my awareness of it I have possibly been saved from its worst excesses, I always conclude that its effect has been bad, almost entirely bad.

  I fall asleep and am awakened by Doctor Rainbow, to whom Saturday makes no difference at all.

  ‘Let’s have a look at you.’ He is already doing so. ‘Breathe. Good. Again. Yes, that’s fine. Now, this side. Breathe …’

  He puts a thermometer under my arm, looks at his watch, then stands with his arms folded and waits. I watch his face, and compose a speech I will not make.

  ‘What were you thinking of as you watched the yabbies rising in the water and listened to the soughing of the she-oaks? Or had thought been shocked to a standstill? You were eight. Did you know that gas was lethal?’

  I am still watching his face as he reads the thermometer. ‘Good. That’s very good. You may get up for longer today.’

  He is really pleased. I am astonished that the slight recovery of one old woman could mean anything to him. It is a pity to disappoint him.

  ‘I don’t want to get up at all.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I am too tired.’

  ‘Oh, come along. This won’t do.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m afraid it will have to do. I must sleep.’

  He is disapproving but silent. What can he do? After he goes I lie on my side and pull the bedclothes over my ears. I hear Jack Cust come into the house, and, a little later, Betty, but on both occasions I pretend I am asleep. I think Doctor Rainbow must have told them I am being ‘difficult’. Yes, in this somnolent Saturday afternoon, I think I have made
a tiny, meaningless flurry. I am sick with boredom at the thought of it.

  Again I hear the distant rifle fire, so like that other thud, of tennis balls against the taut-sprung racquet. I lie on my side, with my head drawn into my shoulders. I am uncomfortable, yet resistant to movement, hungry, yet resistant to food. Betty Cust comes again, and this time, in case she should be alarmed enough to call Doctor Rainbow, I force myself to roll over and open my eyes.

  ‘Still not hungry, Nora?’

  ‘I want nothing.’

  She has brought me Mrs Partridge’s embroidery. With cold politeness, I sit up and let her spread it on my lap. I look at it for a few minutes, then say flatly, almost sullenly, ‘It is very good.’

  ‘Isn’t it! Though the maggie’s still my favourite.’

  So it may be, but this one is by far the best of the three. It is truly amazing. I swear that with my swirling suns, moons, and stars, I forestalled Lurçat. It was one of those I sat up to work on until the early hours of the morning, so that next day I dozed in the stock room of the shop in town. Its excellence disturbs as well as amazes me. I hold it up by the corners.

  ‘I wonder what would have happened if I had never left this place.’

  ‘Haven’t you ever wondered before?’

  ‘Never. Never once. I always believed it was imperative. But this shows I had begun to do something here after all. I have never done anything of this quality since. Who knows what else I may have drawn …’

  I stop myself in time. The words in my mind were ‘drawn out of the compression of a secret life’. But to say them is to be obliged to explain them, and in any case, Betty, smiling brightly, seems to consider my speculation as already complete.

  ‘No, you can never tell about these things, can you? You know, Grace always said you would come back.’

  ‘She was right, I did. But very very late. And like anything else I have ever done, against my intentions. I never intended to return here. Although I did once intend to return to Sydney.’

  ‘I know. She was so disappointed when you changed your mind.’

  ‘Disappointed? I thought she was annoyed. She had a way of being annoyed with me.’

  Betty looks at me with her head first on one side, then on the other. ‘Sometimes, when you talk about Grace, I feel I’m eavesdropping.’

  I am rather taken aback. In my association with Betty I have tended to take it for granted that I am the clever one. ‘Well,’ I say, ‘she practically stopped writing to me. Though perhaps that was because she just couldn’t be bothered with anything much any more. Dorothy and she had been friends all their lives. I can well imagine how that horrible event must have made Grace sick and disgusted with everything.’

  Again Betty looks at me with her head tilted. I have often veered away from a subject because I have believed that her experience cannot encompass mine, but I have never wondered until now if she sometimes has the same difficulty. Her reflective face suggests it, and so does her tone of resignation when she says, ‘Nora, I’ll bring some water and glucose and put it by your bed. And I’ve left some fish soup in the fridge, in case you’re hungry later.’ She smiles. ‘Do try to eat it.’

  I see that she wants to leave me in a cheerful mood. She picks up the embroidery, holds it at arm’s length, and looks at it in a lively way.

  ‘I think after all it is the best.’

  She has no talent for falsity. ‘There is no doubt about it,’ I say snappishly.

  ‘Well, wait till you’re quite better, Nora. You’ll do something just as good.’

  We seem to have returned to our usual plane. Her ignorance embarrasses me. I change the subject. ‘I do hope Mrs Partridge hung it among her New Guinea masks. The juxtaposition would be amusing.’

  ‘She didn’t. She likes it so much she keeps it over her writing desk. But she said to tell you to keep it if you like. Her eyesight is so bad she can’t appreciate it now.’

  ‘I should like her to have it back, all the same.’

  ‘Then take it back yourself, Nora, when you’re better.’

  It is getting dark by the time she finally leaves. My hunger passes. There is no moon, and for once I wish that the house were closer to the street. The silence is stifling. I do not sleep, but turn in my bed in various attitudes of patient discomfort. I think of Dorothy Rainbow and her axe, and wonder what kind of monster I am that my thoughts should flow with such apparent naturalness from her to Belle, from the woman to the cat. I pick Belle up again (as I was bound to do), and feel again beneath my hands the flow of her blood and her strong heart beating. For she was, at first, as supine as heavy cloth, or as that ugly fur ‘piece’ I wore when boarding the ship for London.

  Was it my own disgust I attributed to Grace? When I was young I used to respond to meaningless cruelty with tears and sullen deep rebellion, but in later years, and especially these latest years, what I feel is an intense and general disgust that quickly turns to self-disgust, a torpid and poisoned state of which I have a great dread. But tonight I offer it no resistance. I can’t be bothered. I accept it. My mouth grows wry with it. I am still enveloped by it as I drop off to sleep.

  But in my sleep the heavy gentle animal receives her charge of knowledge and is convulsed beneath my hands. I cry out and grip her hard. She bucks and twists, her claws strike my wrist, terror flows from her to me, and I shout with rage and cram her frantically into the cage. I am still cramming her in, pushing and shouting, and cursing her for my unbearable pity, when I wake up.

  I wake up to the smell of blood. There is blood on my wrist and blood soaking my nightdress and the bed. ‘Something terrible has happened,’ I say to myself. ‘I am bleeding. As soon as my heart stops pounding, I must open my eyes, and turn on the light, and see what has happened.’

  So much blood cannot have come only from the reopened wound on my wrist, but I am careful to spare it as I move to the side of the bed and turn on the light with my right hand.

  But I can no longer smell blood. Has the light dispelled it? I raise my left wrist. On the skin, crossing the blue veins, runs the taut pink line of a healed scar. I raise the sheets and see that a heavy sweat has made my nightdress stick to my skin. And—there is no doubt about it—I am extremely hungry.

  I change my nightdress and am comforted by the touch of dry cloth on my skin. I am too hungry to be tempted by water and glucose. As I walk to the kitchen it seems that it is my hunger, and not the lights I turn on as I go, that presses back the darkness in my path. Betty has put an electric radiator in the kitchen. I turn it on before I take the fish soup from the refrigerator.

  I have health. In my mind and my body, health persists. Not perfect health, but enough to combat the sicknesses of my mind and body.

  After I have eaten and washed my dishes I go to the hall cupboard and take out two fresh sheets. Changing my bed is a laborious matter, but there is enjoyment in deploying my patience, my persistence. When the bed is made I climb into it, sighing with relief, and fall at once into a deep sleep.

  I wake to the sound of lonely footsteps in the street. A single person, light-footed, is passing at a slow but not desultory pace. Then comes another. Then the sound of several cars. Then the busier broken pattering of a small group on foot. Then one car. It is scarcely light. The cars disturb a pattern that is otherwise hauntingly familiar, but it is not until all sound has died away that I hear my mother’s voice.

  ‘There go the Catholics, off to Mass.’

  She always said ‘Mass’ with an amused inflection. So did Fred. Liza was a Catholic. ‘Of the back-sliding kind,’ she once said. ‘Is there any other kind?’ enquired Fred. ‘Not one in the whole world,’ replied Liza. ‘But think how much further we might slide without it.’

  Doctor Rainbow is not quite so unaffected by Sunday as by Saturday. He arrives about nine, wearing a crumpled tweed jacket and grey trousers instead of a crumpled suit. I come out of the bathroom to find him standing in the hall.

  ‘You’ve had a bath,’ he sa
ys.

  ‘A shower,’ I say. ‘Is that permitted?’

  ‘I don’t recommend it. But I suppose I can’t stop you. You’re like your sister.’

  ‘Were you Grace’s doctor?’

  ‘I tried to be. She was wilful, you know. She did as she pleased.’ And then he adds, with his queer stiff humility, ‘Don’t do too much, will you? Stay up for a while, but don’t overdo it. You could sit on that little back verandah. It’s quite a sun trap since your sister had it glassed in.’

  When he goes I return to the bathroom, wash out my sweaty nightdress, and roll it in a towel. To reach the back verandah, where I mean to hang it in the sun he spoke of, I pass through the back bedroom, once my brother’s room. Always a cool room, even in summer, this morning it is cold. But it is no longer a bedroom. Grace has made it into a summer sitting room. Rushmatting covers the floor, the furniture is of heavy cane, the timber walls have been stripped of paint and their good vertical grain disclosed, and traces of soil in two blue-and-white Chinese pots suggest palms or bamboo. It all looks fairly new, and attests not only to the energy of Grace’s last years, but to the expansion of her interests as well. The general effect, the combined austerity and comfort, is so successful that I raise my eyebrows and blink in insulting amazement, as I used to do to annoy her when we were girls.

  I open the door to the back verandah and am dazzled, first by the flood of sunlight and the cool black shine of the floor, and then by a view through the glass of a garden so fresh and verdant, so deep and rich and detailed, that I wonder for a moment if the glass is tinted. A glance at the sky assures me that it is not. I open the door and go with great care, concentrating only on my feet, down the back stairs.

  Again they are fourteen planks spanning air, but narrower than in the front, and set in this case parallel to the house and propped against a little square platform. I hang my wet things on a small revolving hoist at the foot of the steps and turn to examine the garden.

  The longish grass, of which several sections are of an even richer green than the rest, thins out under the big mango tree and the canopy of the persimmon. Shrubs conceal the high fences, and in the deep shade of the mango tree stands a garden seat of white iron. At the end of the garden, where for a decade after my father’s death stood the gradually sagging stable and buggy shed, is an uneven hillocky area thickly overgrown with green.