She comes from an era that has passed. Books, films, theatre, the art world — all are in an extraordinary shakedown. The films she makes no longer have any place in the currency of culture; they are meditations on fragments that take hold of her, often rambling, looping round and round and round an idea, using images, words, and sounds to play with notions that surface and sink, surface and sink. They would never show on television, they would never get a cinema release, they would not be watched by anyone on YouTube. They screen in festivals, mainly overseas, where she is often invited to talk, and where the few devoted followers of such work know and admire her.
She has never been sad about this, or bitter. She regards herself as exceptionally fortunate, actually. She found her niche at the tail end of this particular incarnation of cinema, and she was able to keep making work. She didn’t want fame, although some notoriety ensured her work was screened and she received the occasional funding to produce another film. She also didn’t want money. Maurie’s success meant they had enough to live well.
He had more ego invested in his work than she ever did. He pretended it wasn’t the case — he always said he painted for himself, and to an extent, he did. But the truth was — and she shakes her head at the memory of the tirades he would go into (or worse still, the slumps) whenever he was passed over for a prize or didn’t receive a prominent enough review — he wanted mass adoration.
His paintings cover the walls of this house. Many of them are now quite valuable. She looks around her, letting her gaze settle on each of the ones in this room, trying to assess them without his presence. His work never changed. In all the years of painting, he stuck to one style: strong, thick brushstrokes, harsh lines of colour criss-crossing each other, almost as though they had been smeared on with the back of his fist, the effect striking, energetic but — and she smiles again — also perplexing.
She has never understood his paintings.
Once when they were very stoned, she admitted as much to him.
‘I mean, are you thinking anything at all, when you do this?’ She had begun to giggle as she waved her hand over a canvas. ‘You call it “Terrain”, but you could call it anything, couldn’t you?’
Maurie, who had always had a sense of humour, had laughed, the great sonorous delight of his amusement filling the studio. ‘I’m changing its name,’ he pronounced, ‘to “Hilary”.’
‘Oh no,’ she protested. ‘I’m not that one.’ She looked around the room, her eyes finally alighting on a larger, more dramatic canvas, one that threatened to spill over onto the walls. ‘That’s me.’
She presumes he too had been exploring ideas, within his own language, although that was not a language she spoke with any eloquence. She responded on an aesthetic level only — the nature of the colours and shapes either arresting, or pleasing, or too ugly for her to want in the house. She was the one who selected which of his works they kept, aside from the few paintings he gave her, which she had to like.
She had contemplated sorting through the collection, calling the State and National Galleries to talk about keeping them together, and then she hadn’t. The girls can deal with it, she had thought. She looks up at the ceiling and bites her lip. This is her sadness. Leaving them and knowing they aren’t speaking to each other. Not that her being here has brought them closer to mending the rift.
Fuck Lawrence.
She rubs her temples slowly, wanting to ease the pain that is beginning to creep through the pills she took this morning, its sharp nails scratching at her brain. She is not meant to take any more medication until this evening — but what does it really matter? And she looks through her bag for the canister, her hand shaking slightly as she opens it, the smooth capsule falling onto the floor.
She is alone.
She takes slow, deep breaths, steady, steady, steady, picking the pill up and swallowing it without water. She has to bring everything down to the moment, to stay right in the present. She must imagine she is in a bubble of the immediate, able only to see, hear, taste, smell, and contemplate the world that is right next to her. Nothing beyond the boundaries.
She takes her shoes off and lets her toes rub through the carpet, the silky softness of the wool soothing against her skin. She runs her hands along the worn patch on the arm of the sofa, feeling each frayed edge of cotton, fine and delicate. The curtains are open to the courtyard, and she looks at the moss growing in the brick, jewelled green, luminous, velvety, so beautiful as it creeps, determined life in its growth, along the cracks and across the surface of the stone.
The rain is pouring over the gutters in a translucent sheet, bringing with it the occasional leaf or twig. They need clearing, she thinks. Another task to be completed — or not — by someone else. Because, conceivably, she could go, and all of this — her house, the remnants of her life — could remain, left to slowly rot away, back to nothing. The couch, the paintings, the books, the rug, the walls, roof, and floors — all disintegrating.
There is a slight break in the clouds, a piercing of light through the sombre darkness, and she stands to see if the day is clearing, but the vision is gone almost as soon as it has appeared, and a new sheet of grey covers the gap, bringing only more rain. What a day. She opens the door and steps out, wanting to feel the moss underfoot and the sweetness of the rain as it falls, cold and constant, soaking into her hair, beading on the surface of her skin, saturating her clothes. It is extraordinary that it can keep doing this, raining and raining and raining. And she stays where she is until she is too cold to bear it any longer, bringing a trail of damp mud and twigs into the house as she heads up the stairs to dry herself and change before Lawrence arrives.
When Maurie died, she took all his clothes to Salvation Army, packing them up the day after his funeral.
‘You don’t need to rush,’ Ester told her.
It was the smell of him each time she opened the wardrobe. It made her tremble.
He’d had a ridiculous amount of clothes. Jackets, pants, shirts, belts, all no longer worn, but kept in the certainty that there would come a time when he would be as trim as he’d been as a student, and he would put them on and look as handsome as he had in his youth. Some she remembered as she packed them. A beautiful worn green leather coat, soft to touch; an op-shop suit of heavy navy wool, double-breasted and stylish; a steel-grey sweater that his mother had knitted him. He hoarded.
‘You might want to keep something,’ Esther had suggested. She’d looked at one of the boxes, taking out a fat buttercup-yellow silk tie. ‘Lawrence might like this,’ she’d said.
And Hilary had told her to take it, to take anything she wanted, but to do it now because the boxes were going down to the car as soon as they were packed.
When she’d finished with the clothes, she went to his studio. That was easier. She took the paintings, and the rest she left, calling friends of theirs and asking them to clear it out. ‘And please keep whatever you like,’ she’d urged.
When she saw the ‘For Sale’ sign, Ester had said she needed to slow down. ‘Maybe you’ll want to convert it into a museum? You don’t know.’
It was sold to a developer who remodelled it into a warehouse apartment, realising more than three times the purchase price. She never went to the open inspection, but Ester did, showing her the brochure afterwards. She’d been angry.
‘How could they just wipe him out like that? Don’t they know what that space was?’
Hilary had told her it was good. ‘He’s gone,’ she said.
Because that wasn’t him. Not the studio, not the paintings, not the clothes. They were all nothing without the flesh and blood of him, the warmth and bristle and laughter, the curve of his hip, the beautiful line of his back, the sharp focus of his gaze, his hand warm on her skin. That was her ache and her pain, even now, and she closes her eyes to the memory of him, the physical sense of his presence enveloping her.
He’s gone.
She doesn’t know what she believes, but she certainly has no faith in being reunited with Maurie in any kind of afterlife. That is not what this is about. If she expects anything at all — and she cannot let her mind rest for too long on any consequences flowing from her decision — she supposes it is the peace of absence, the calm of non-existence, that awaits her. Which isn’t to say that she would regard herself as atheist. To deny the possibility of mystery is abhorrent to her, although to claim any knowledge of that mystery is equally repellent.
She dries her hair slowly, the steely white of her curls coarse in her hands. In the mirror, the age of her skin, the droop in her eyes is, as always, a shock to her. The towel is soft beneath her fingers, and she breathes it in deeply. She can smell April, and she presumes that this is the towel she used this morning. There is a milky sweetness to April; beneath the alcohol and cigarettes, the fear and the sadness, there is the hint of frangipani, and she holds it close.
When April had told her what had happened with Lawrence (and she hadn’t done so until Hilary had gone over to her house, furious and sad and unable to comprehend how she could have been so stupid), the anger she had felt had been knotted, a squall as dense and dark as any she had known, but it had quickly dispersed.
She had so often seen April’s tears, her drama and her capacity to hijack the emotions of others. But on that morning, she had been different. Hollowed out, unable to speak, she hadn’t responded to Hilary’s anger — and in the face of that silence, Hilary had stopped as suddenly as she had begun. Shaking her head, she had simply held April and told her that this was a mistake that they would all need time to recover from, aware as she uttered those words that the time required could extend beyond what they had.
She changes into dry clothes: a dark-grey cotton top and loose black trousers. The few clothes she owns are all similar; they always have been. She is a practical person, someone who finds a style that suits her and is easy to live in, and then stays with it. If she wears colour, it is usually a discrete flash — a bright scarf or her enamelled ring. And she puts this on now, the red like a crimson petal, concentrated in its beauty.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she looks out the window to the last magnolia blooms, the first pale leaves of spring unfurling cellophane-fine along the branches, soon to crowd out every petal with a luridly healthy display of green.
Hilary loves this tree. She planted it when they moved to this house shortly after Ester was born, and it grew strong and beautiful, so perfectly sure of its place. In winter, when the leaves are gone, the sun shines through the window, and she delights in the beauty of each flower. Port-wine petals, smooth and waxy, cupped open to the sky. And then, as the summer sun increases in intensity, the foliage provides a cool green shade against the heat of the day.
She won’t see it bloom again.
She bundles her damp clothes into her arms to put in the laundry. Conceivably, she could just leave them where they are, on the floor outside her room. Or she could throw them out. They should go to a charity shop, where they will be put on racks with the rows and rows and rows of other pants and tops without an owner — a decision that may just be a delay of the inevitability of contributing to landfill, but one that she likes to think is less wasteful than going straight to the bin. However, this is not the only reason why she takes them downstairs. She is committed to the choice she has made. That much she knows. But it doesn’t mean she can bear to take steps that prematurely signal the finality of all she must do. Not yet. And so she holds them under one arm as she walks through to the laundry where the rain drums, ratatatatatat, on the tin roof, on and on and on, while she hangs them on the rack as though she will need them again.
But she won’t need them again.
Enough. It is so hard trying to keep this voice at bay.
In the kitchen, she takes a pear from the fruit bowl, and holds it in the palm of her hand. It is firm and round, the brown skin rough, furry enough to send slight shivers up her spine. She slices into it, not because she is hungry, but because she needs to calm herself, absorb herself in a close examination of something, anything. (It was so much easier when she was finishing off her film.) The flesh is creamy-yellow, crisp, the sweetness of the pear almost almond-like, a sugary granulation to the juice along the edge of the knife.
There. And as she sits and takes a bite, disliking the sensation of the skin against her tongue, she focuses her mind on the experience only, her sense of calm returning, cautiously, like a whipped dog creeping back to its master.
LAWRENCE DRIVES IN the rain, the windscreen wipers clicking back and forth, back and forth. He has the demister on high, and it cuts a hole through the fog, but the noise is too loud. He turns it off and opens the window, the cold and the wet forcing him to close it again moments later.
He’s glad April has the kids (even though he knows she shouldn’t). In this weather, he wouldn’t get back across town to collect them from afterschool care until much later than usual, and they would complain — no doubt telling Ester as soon as they could, painting him as the neglectful parent.
He takes a wrong turn and swears loudly. This is not a day to be out, he thinks, and he cranks the demister up again, the rattle loud as it clears the windscreen to show him what he already knows: it is raining heavily.
Pulling over to the side of the road, he stops. The corrosive acid of worry is making his gut ache, and the truth is, it’s his own predicament that’s the principal cause of this. He glances at himself in the rear-vision mirror. Hilary’s news is terrible. Terrible. But deep inside, he is glad for a diversion from his own trouble, and he is ashamed of how appallingly pervasive his own self-absorption is.
He will be a national scandal.
No, he won’t.
He shakes his head. The paper isn’t going to want his confession to go public. They won’t want to look like fools. He will be fired — which is happening anyway. But he will get no good word for the work he has done. He will spend the next years of his working life scrabbling for dull jobs measuring customer satisfaction, brand recognition, product loyalty — all the while getting less and less work as his name sinks into oblivion.
Perhaps it won’t even be that bad. Paul won’t want anyone to know. And it is not as though he needs any kind of reference from the paper. His name has been out there for long enough. He will tender for other political jobs — internal party polling — something that doesn’t have a public profile, so Edmund won’t be tempted to salvage Lawrence’s conscience with another confession.
Perhaps everything will continue as it has been?
He winces slightly.
On a scale of one to five, where five is extremely satisfied and one is extremely dissatisfied, how do you feel about your life?
He used to do the odd bit of direct phone polling, just to keep his hand in as to which questions worked and which were problematic. It was years ago, when he still had days in which he could fool himself that he liked his job, that it even mattered.
Sometimes the respondent would argue.
‘Are you talking about how I feel right this instant? As I’m wasting my time answering your questions on the phone? Or are you talking about five minutes ago, when I was enjoying a peaceful drink at the end of a hard day?’
Fair enough.
Every question had so many potential nuances, and for each there were so many responses that could be given at any moment, influenced by something as simple as having just heard a song that irritated the shit out of the person, or having eaten a delicious meal.
It was the horrifying conclusion of democracy, an attempt to capture and measure the extraordinarily infinite range of our desires, beliefs, thoughts, dreams, and hopes. Everyone had the chance to speak. Worse still, the dross of it was actually being listened to; extracts of sludge were being drawn out, held up as truth, and it pained him more than he could bear. W
as that why he had done it? Perhaps that was part of the reason. And because he could. That was the strange thrill of it — knowing he could tweak a little here, tuck a little there, kid himself that he was making the voice of humanity sound just that bit better.
Sometimes, late at night, Lawrence would go out. He would walk the streets on his own, thinking he was going to find a bar and have a drink, thinking he might even take someone home and lose himself momentarily in sex.
He would open the back gate onto the laneway, the smell of the jasmine that grew over the rotting wooden palings sickly sweet, the air dark and soft against his skin, the sounds of laughter in other houses, sometimes shouting or arguing, the lights in the rooms framing all the lives within — lonely, messy, hopeful — television screens glowing, dishes being done, heads bent over desks, a young girl dancing on her own in her bedroom, a child asleep on a couch, a dog barking relentlessly. And he would know he was not going to stop at a bar; he was just going to walk and walk, letting it wash over him, the great chaos of it all, impossible to contain.
And so, at the end of the laneway he followed the maze of streets until he was out on the oval — empty except for the occasional midnight walker like himself — and he would sit on a bench and look out across the expanse of green, floodlit by the lights that bordered the path in the distance, a spill of brightness under the sky.
He felt at peace then. Tired and empty, but at peace. Yet sadness was inevitable. As soon as he realised that he was content, it would dissipate, the awareness breaking up any stillness of his soul, stirring it into a thousand particles that floated away, only to be replaced with a gnawing dissatisfaction, a sorrow that this was not his usual state.
This was the way it had always been.
As soon as he finally held what he wanted in his hands, he lost it.
Between a Wolf and a Dog Page 17