Fine

by Michelle Wright

  When she leaves the museum and returns to the heat outside, she slows her pace and heads for the Marais. Walking through the gardens of the National Archives she squints as her face and bare arms flicker from sunlight to shadow. She realises how seldom she actually feels her skin. She feels things when they rub up against her skin, but she doesn’t often feel it just being there in the air; the warmth of it as she passes from shade to sun sliding through between two trees. She feels it now and it is so unfamiliar that she stops to retrace her steps, to feel that shift from cool to lukewarm one more time, to check that’s what she’s feeling. Brigitte looks up and there’s a man in a suit staring at her and he doesn’t look away. She wonders what she looks like to him, stepping purposefully in and out of shadows, and she guesses he probably thinks she’s mad. She wants to tell him that she’s not mad, just spending some time with herself, and that if he wants to see mad, he should have been in front of the Pompidou Centre earlier this afternoon when there was a man with a tartan scarf on his head, held together by a big safety pin under his chin, despite the thirty-degree heat, and a woman who was pacing up and down for hours, inexplicably, with a carnation in her hand. She stops in the shade of a tree and nods at the man and he nods back and continues on his way. There is a bench a little further on and she thinks she’ll sit and wait for the sun to disappear behind the tall sandstone walls.

  When she starts to feel hungry she finds an expensive boutique in a crowded street and buys an ice-cream with three different flavours she’s never tried before and walks back towards the river. She eats with her feet over the edge of the riverbank, and then walks in the shadow of the stone walls and climbs the stairs just before Notre Dame. The late afternoon is warm and there are roller-bladers zigzagging through their slalom course of empty soft-drink cans. She sits well away from them and the crowds of people watching, and studies their elegant calves and thighs and the silent signals of respect that pass between them.

  Her apartment isn’t far away, but she’s not ready to go back yet. She likes to visit the Père Lachaise cemetery when she’s got some time free and she decides that’s where she’ll head. She takes the Métro and arrives just before the gates are due to close. In the narrow alleys between the tombs there are solitary tourists, couples arm in arm and guided tours. One group is American, young professionals keen to show off their knowledge of French existentialist philosophers and surrealist poets. One member of the group is holding a boy of about five by the hand, but ignoring him completely. No one has told him what a cemetery is for, so he wears his Mickey Mouse ears and pokes his tongue out at her and kicks gravel with his sneakers at strangers walking past. The group are gathered around a stone angel that has toppled from its grave. Its fallen wings, fractured, mildewed, resting where it thumped down in a storm or was maybe pushed by vandals, stopped in its fall against the trunk of a tree. Its slender limbs caught and held by branches, like an old couple’s hands entwined, knotted, stiff, yet holding on. I’ll support you. Lean on me. I won’t let you go. The tenderness of it makes her want to cry.

  Darkness falls heavy as she starts the walk back from the cemetery. There’s a movie she’s been meaning to see and she knows it’s showing late in a cinema in the eleventh. Her feet are feeling better with the cooler air and there’s time before the movie starts so she takes side streets to draw out the walk and see what she’ll discover. She loves the streets of the eleventh, where she spent her student years, and the area around Bastille. Walking past stairs that lead down from the footpath to locked public toilets below the street, she sees a figure and turns her head towards it. A man looks up at her with a too-small t-shirt tight across his torso and naked from the waist down. With his right hand he masturbates furiously and his open mouth is full of spit. Brigitte looks away and down the street. There is no one in sight. Just heavy double wooden doors with their keypad codes and shuttered shop windows. She continues walking without breaking her step; doesn’t hasten, doesn’t turn around again, just listens, trying to distinguish the echo of her steps bouncing off the stone facades from the possibility of a second set of feet. By the time she reaches the intersecting road, she’s fairly sure he hasn’t followed, and as she turns the corner she glances back towards the stairway and sees his head in the dim yellow light, still jerking with his movements.

  She arrives at the cinema shaken, but the cool air in the basement room and the blue lights on the walls create a calmness that slows her breathing. She buys an ice-cream and chooses a seat towards the back. There are three couples and two other solitary customers in the cinema and the murmur of their conversations is like a lullaby. She lays her head on the velvet armrest of her seat and closes her eyes. When she wakes her ice-cream has slipped from her hand onto the floor and the film has already begun.

  It’s after midnight when the film ends, so she has to hurry to the station to catch the last train home. The platform is deserted apart from an older man, and the only noise from the tunnel is the distant movement of air.

  The click of a woman’s heels descending the stairs at the far end of the platform resonates off the curved tiles above Brigitte’s head. The woman appears, walks along the platform and sits a few seats further down. She is younger than Brigitte, in her forties, very proper, dressed in a dark skirt and jacket, with a large leather briefcase on her knees which she opens and fishes around in. The older man and Brigitte both watch her, and when she takes out a harmonica and brings it to her lips, they both lean forward in their seats. The woman’s eyes are closed and her head dips and sways with the phrases of the piece she plays. Brigitte recognises ‘Summertime’, by Gershwin. She’s heard it a hundred times, but now she listens to every note, and it’s like she’s never heard it so clearly. With her eyes closed she feels the blood in her veins like cool water and the air from the tunnel settling on the back of her neck. When she opens her eyes and tips her head back she sees the water sweating on the surface of the tiles above her head. The woman’s hands curl around the instrument and her lips are taut like she’s giving it the kiss of life.

  Before the last notes have disappeared along the tunnel, the woman opens her eyes, puts the harmonica back in her briefcase, and looks straight ahead at the advertising posters on the platform opposite. The old man shrugs his shoulders and wonders if his tiredness has created the whole scene in his head. But Brigitte knows that what just happened is real and that its beauty and its sadness are what makes her being here worthwhile. No one in her life would understand this feeling. She wouldn’t even try to explain it to Jean-Michel. He’d just look at her like she was speaking gibberish. But that doesn’t matter right now. Brigitte knows there’s things she’ll have to tell him when he gets back, but for the moment she’s happy to linger in this other place. Knowing that there’ll always be someone she can find in Paris being whatever they want, making music or watching strangers kissing or wandering through cemeteries with no one bothering to rein them in. And even if she doesn’t know their names, and whether they look her in the eye or look the other way, she knows that if she wanted them to be, they could be her closest allies.

  Last Rites

  Brian’s pretty sure the home was run by Catholics. He doesn’t have any records, though, and his memories are jumpy as an old super 8 film. He can see all of them going to chapel in the mornings after breakfast. They’d have to go down to the basement, where it reeked of mouldy carpet. He remembers retching and the smell of curdled milk that came out of his nostrils. There were the beatings in the office too and the fondling at night. Those things he’s forgetting more these days, but they creep into his dreams from time to time and his teeth are worn down from all the grinding. Sometimes, when he’s lying awake in bed, he pictures those priests and painful things being done to their balls, and that helps the hours pass.

  When he was sleeping rough just before he got this job, he was robbed one night and bashed up pretty badly. The doctor in the emergency department who patched him up was young and wanting to make a d
ifference. She asked him lots of questions and listened to his answers. She fetched a social worker and they kept him there for hours and talked about the Royal Commission and the police and possible investigations. But Brian wasn’t keen. It was all too long ago and he’s not good at talking to lots of strangers, he explained. He’s better one on one.

  Maybe that’s why he started telling Maria about the childhood stuff recently, even though she tells him she doesn’t want to hear it. She’s going deaf anyway. Probably doesn’t hear half of what goes on. She says there are things that are better not to talk about. Things only for God to judge. Brian calls her a rosary rattler, but just behind her back. Arthritic hip and all, she’s in the church every afternoon when he arrives for his cleaning shift. He’s working for the dole. She just works for God. She picks fresh flowers once a week and fills the vase next to the font by the door, and one on either side of the altar. She can’t wait for the gardenias. It’s their time after Michaelmas. Brian finds them sickening. So sticky sweet and heady. Maria carries on about her favourite saint—San Michele Arcangelo—and his grotto in her home town at the top of Italy’s heel. When she talks about the old country, even though the words are English, she might as well be speaking Italian. If he closes his eyes she sounds like Sophia Loren in a black-and-white film on a hot dusty road with her buttons undone. When he opens them, though, she’s looking at him like he’s a feral goat. Not one to turn your back on. That’s probably what she’s thinking.

  Maria’s left and he’s still finishing up in the presbytery, so he doesn’t hear the tyres screech over the noise of the vacuum cleaner. Or maybe the driver didn’t brake. Maybe they tried to swerve. Or maybe they didn’t think it was worth it for a fox.

  He packs away the vacuum and the cleaning trolley, and locks the presbytery door. He’s walking through the drizzle towards his car with his parka hood pulled down low over his forehead when he sees its orange flank. It’s glowing under a streetlamp, wet with rain and blood, slick as marmalade. He crouches down beside it in the gutter. Definitely dead. One eye popped and intestines out, glossy and blood-smeared, gleaming red like cellophane. But its muzzle is fine and slender, clean white along its cheeks. He knows it’s a pest, a threat to indigenous fauna, an outsider and all that. But even so, there’s no denying it’s a truly pretty creature.

  He returns to the church, opens the cleaning cupboard and takes out a black garbage bag to put the body in. From the toolshed in the presbytery grounds, where the lawnmower and garden tools are stored, he finds a spade to dig the hole. He’s not sure how deep to make it. The ground in the churchyard is tough, but softened a bit by the rain. He picks a spot next to an old priest’s grave and digs down a couple of feet. In his younger days he could’ve managed more, but his back’s not what it used to be and the muscles in his arms have gone to mush. He places the garbage bag down in the hole and shovels in the dirt. By the time he’s finished, the drizzle has stopped and he can see the first stars through the breaks in the clouds. The scene is silent and almost dignified, and he’s pretty proud of what he’s done, but he knows what’s missing from the grave. He fingers through his keys and opens the front door of the church. Just inside is Maria’s vase of gardenias, three days old and stinking out the place. He takes them from the vase, dips their stalks in the font by the door and carries them back to the grave, holy water dripping on his shoes. He kneels down and with his thumb carves a deep hollow in the soil towards the head of the grave. He pushes the gardenia stalks in and pats the soil back up around them to hold them upright. They droop with the weight of the heads, but more or less look the part. When he stands back up and looks down at the dislodged soil, he sees the muddied knees of his work pants. Not a very fitting send-off, he thinks and runs his clean hand through his hair.

  He knows the priests’ vestments are stored in the sacristy, though he’s only seen them once, when he came to work a bit early one afternoon and the priest had just finished a funeral and was still getting undressed. He opens the narrow wooden wardrobe and takes the two robes out. He puts the white one on first, on top of his parka. The bright green wets the white fabric and clings to it. He looks at himself in the narrow mirror on the back of one of the wardrobe doors. He looks like a fluorescent snowman.

  ‘Fucking brilliant!’ He laughs. He pulls the gold one off its hanger and slides it on over the top. This one’s made of thicker fabric and hangs stiff and heavy past his muddy knees.

  He’d seen the last rites administered once in the early seventies to an old bloke in the same ward as him one time he was in hospital. He knows there should be oil and that it’s too late now the fox is in the ground, but he decides he’ll use the phrases all the same. It’s as close as he’s got and the words feel good in his mouth. ‘Through this holy anointing, may the Lord pardon you whatever sins you have committed by carnal delectation.’ He’d memorised the words back when he’d heard them, and though he didn’t know what delectation meant, he’d liked the sound of it. He’d looked it up in a dictionary in the public library a little while later and tried to use it from then on whenever he could slip it in. He makes the sign of the cross in the air like a priest and says, ‘A-bloody-men!’

  As he finishes, the headlights of a car slow in front of the church, back up and pull into the car park. He doesn’t even think of hiding, just stands still, his hands by his sides poking out from the robes, at the head of the grave. The car’s headlights are turned off and the driver’s door opens. A large figure in a coat gets out. Brian sees it’s a woman with a scarf over her hair, and as soon as she starts walking towards him, he recognises Maria from her lopsided gait.

  ‘This’ll be good,’ he says under his breath and waits as she gets closer.

  ‘Dio mio! Cosa sta succedendo?’ she exclaims when she sees it’s him, and she crosses herself three times. ‘Who have you buried? You have murdered someone. You have buried the body.’

  Brian knows he couldn’t even kill an animal, but he’s suddenly sad to know that maybe that’s not the impression people have of him.

  ‘It’s just a fox,’ he says, his chin resting on his chest.

  ‘What?’ says Maria, her voice still high and pitchy.

  ‘A fox,’ he repeats, lifting his head. ‘It got run over by a car, so I buried it.’

  ‘You are not a priest. You cannot wear these things,’ continues Maria, slightly more calmly.

  She looks down at his muddy boots and then works her way up over the gold embroidered robe, up to his rain-soaked hair and then down again to his belly.

  ‘Why you so fat?’ she asks.

  ‘Huh?’ says Brian.

  ‘You fatter than normal,’ she explains, gesturing with her head towards his stomach.

  ‘Oh,’ mutters Brian. ‘I’ve got me parka on underneath.’

  Maria continues to frown into his eyes, but he thinks he sees a slight movement of amusement in the corner of her mouth.

  Her eyes shift back down to the grave.

  ‘And you take my flowers from the church too.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Brian says, and leans over the grave to pull the gardenias out.

  ‘No. Leave them there,’ says Maria. ‘They no good now.’

  They stand without talking for a good minute, on either side of the grave, just looking down.

  ‘You take those things off and you put them back, you hear!’

  Without looking up at her, Brian asks, ‘Are you going to tell Father Crawford?’

  She doesn’t answer straight away; just breathes loudly in and out and pulls her slipping headscarf further forward.

  ‘Some things are better not to talk about,’ she replies. ‘Some things only for God to judge.’

  Brian looks up at her. ‘I don’t believe in God, Maria.’

  She’s still looking down at the flowers, maybe choosing not to hear.

  ‘And if he did exist,’ he continues, louder, ‘it’s not me he should be judging.’ He waits for her to answer, to say, ‘I don’t know what y
ou talking about,’ or to fix him with her stare. He stands with his hands by his sides, his work boots sliding slightly forward on the edge of the muddy grave. Maria turns, her head still bowed, and starts to walk towards her car. When she’s halfway there, Brian cups his hands either side of his mouth like a megaphone.

  ‘But you’re alright, Maria,’ he yells. ‘Grazie!’

  He’s not sure if she’s heard. She doesn’t look back. Just opens her car door, gets in and turns her headlights on. Brian eases the hood of his parka out from under the robes and pulls it down low over his forehead. He watches her car pull back onto the road as the rain starts up again.

  Fine

  Twenty-five degrees. Twenty-six degrees. Twenty-seven degrees.

  Southerly wind. South-westerly wind.

  Fine. Overcast. Late change.

  Melbourne. Adelaide. Darwin.

  It’s clear he has a background in radio. His voice is balanced, his diction precise. He needs something to occupy his time now he’s retired. And the money comes in handy.

  Even after the diagnosis, he insists on going in to the recording studio for at least an hour a day. Towards the end, they set up the equipment in the dining room of his house. He’s just finished recording the last words on the list when the tumour says, ‘It’s time,’ and he falls from his chair.

  Twelve years later, it’s still his voice that announces the daily telephone weather: towns, temperatures and wind speeds, edited together seamlessly and updated each day.

  From time to time, in the lonely hours of the night, his widow dials the number of Teleweather.

  Fifty-five cents a minute to hear the familiar voice travelling the country: town by town, hot spells to cold snaps, drought to deluge, season by season.

  Perth. Twenty-nine degrees. Late thunderstorm.

  Alice Springs. Thirty-three degrees. Overcast.

  Sydney. Twenty-five degrees. Westerly winds at thirty kilo-metres an hour.