I sit on my perch. I walk up and down, up and down. Lizzie must get better, must come home.
***
On the Wednesday after the Moon Landing, Linda helps Jo prepare for Busy Bee, in which Brownies do small jobs for a few coins. Linda and Jo rule columns on a piece of cardboard that came with a new pair of socks. Jo will write down her activities and earnings on the cardboard. A small pencil is found, small enough to fit into a Vegemite jar with the coins. Jo polishes her metal pixie badge.
After school on Thursday, Jo works Clam Street, knocking on doors and presenting herself in full Brownie uniform. This includes the climatically unsuitable woolly beret, a thick brown leather belt and fawn socks in closed shoes. She has swept a patio for two cents, picked old pegs up off a lawn for one cent, folded a pile of towels for five cents and watered some plants in tubs for a silver ten-cent piece and a glass of lemonade with ice cubes in it.
After school on Friday, there are preparations for a celebratory barbecue at the Johnsons’ house. Linda pays Jo to fold paper serviettes in a decorative manner and create paper doilies to sit under bowls of salted peanuts.
The Moon Ball will be held at the Civic Centre next month, but in the meantime, there must be informal celebrations and a general letting-down of hair.
As children arrive they form a couple of packs, running, crying, knocking things over, lurking under tables and chairs. Adults are eagerly shelling and eating piles of cooked orange prawns and crab legs on ice, but the children prefer to dine on frankfurters with tomato sauce and fairy bread. A small pack breaks away and leaves Clam Street entirely, headed for the seawall. There are a couple of older boys carrying hand-fishing reels on their forearms like big coloured bangles. They have prawns in their pockets. Watched by a little audience, the boys importantly fasten lead sinkers to their lines and thread bits of prawn shell on hooks. The weighted lines whip through the air and splash satisfyingly into the water. The blowfish are biting. They’re hauled in, one after the other. They’re angry and bloated, puffing themselves up into spiky balloons. The boys pick them up by the tails and throw them onto the road. There is a satisfying pop as cars run them over; some cars swerve specifically for this purpose, to entertain the children.
Someone passes a blowie to Susan Kelly. She glances at Stella and Jo gravely. There is a car. She must throw. She does, with her eyes shut. It pops. Susan whispers Hail Mary fulla grace under her breath.
‘Do you feel sorry for it?’ a boy asks Susan.
‘No.’
‘Well, you shouldn’t feel sorry for blowies because they’re poisonous.’
Doubt, shunned for four and a half years and actively kept at bay for four and a half days, suddenly slips in through the back door while Evan is welcoming the family of one of his colleagues at the front. Doubt scoots in over the laundry tiles, genially, looking perfectly at ease, a bottle of beer in one hand and a packet of Jatz biscuits in the other. As Evan turns back into the room after welcoming his friends, he sees Doubt standing there, tall and imposing, looking rather like Dr Harry Baumgarten. Harry has returned to Port Badminton to research the fruit sucking moth and, if possible, see the White-breasted Whistler and the Variegated Fairy-wren.
Evan drops into one armchair and invites Harry to sit in the other.
They eat handfuls of peanuts and talk about insects and the Moon Landing. Evan gets drunk quickly and thoroughly. He starts slurring words and forgetting the beginnings of sentences before he gets to the end of them. People exchange quick little glances behind his back. Once he is plastered, he gets up, walks unsteadily across the room and pulls Linda to one side. He is trying to herd her down the corridor, towards their bedroom.
‘I was just going to get more dip,’ says Linda, trying to shake him off. She would like to have this conversation, whatever it is about, some other time.
‘No!’ says Evan. ‘I want to talk to you now.’ He hustles her into the bedroom and shuts the door.
Evan sits on the bed, staring at the floor as he speaks, as if the words were written on it and he is just reading them out.
‘They were walking on the moon,’ he says. ‘Bounding like very slow kangaroos.’
He says the word ‘bounding’ tragically, his voice cracking. Linda sees that Evan is weeping. A chill sweeps over her. She stands in the doorway, staring at him. He will not look at her.
‘I feel like I’m trying to walk, but I’m floating, floating, I don’t know what a sane pace might be, I don’t know how to put one foot in front of the other. Perhaps I need to kick my foot out, slightly to the side, and lean forward.’
Linda waits. Evan is silent. It seems he has finished his speech.
‘You’ve had far too much to drink,’ she hisses. ‘Sit here and I’ll bring you a coffee, see if you can sober up. People want to talk to you.’
Evan sits motionless on the bed. He is taking only small, conservative breaths, like an astronaut whose suit has been punctured, somewhere out of sight, and the air is escaping.
Linda makes coffee in a teacup with a saucer. These rattle as she walks down the hallway past someone waiting to get into the toilet.
Evan ignores her, remains motionless, as she leans close to set the coffee cup on his bedside table. She retreats to a position near the dressing table.
‘It’s pretty clear what’s been going on around here, under my nose,’ says Evan, quite suddenly and loudly.
‘Let’s talk about it later,’ murmurs Linda.
His eyes are swimming. His brain is sloshing about. She has disappeared.
He finds himself dancing to ‘Baby Elephant Walk’ in a corner of the living room. He grooves all by himself, feet lifting in turn like a wobbly baby elephant. People have given him a circle of space.
Then Linda is there, trying to encircle him with her long arms. Is she trying to dance with him? He shakes her off, almost falling over, and she steadies him. He turns his back on her. His dancing is not for two. It’s a one-man dance.
Linda is standing at the kitchen table watching someone scoop at French onion dip with a Jatz biscuit. The biscuit crumbles, sullying the dip. Linda is sad about this. A shrill woman’s voice is saying ‘It’s nurture not nature!’ and someone else is saying, ‘We are nothing but apes! Animals!’ and another person is saying, ‘Speak for yourself,’ and the drunken crowd finds this hilarious.
Evan Johnson continues to lift one foot and then the other, until the elephant has finished walking. Then there is a pause. A long, quiet pause. Evan strides out of the room, down the back stairs and in a straight, purposeful line towards a knot of people listening to a Harry Baumgarten anecdote.
He catches Harry’s eye and gestures for Harry to follow him. Harry brings his anecdote to an efficient, elegant close and follows Evan, who is strangely silent, out of the backyard, down beside the house, out into the front yard. A couple of Evan’s colleagues are sitting on the front stairs, a long-necked bottle of Swan Lager between them. Evan sees them and swerves away, needing to get away from everyone, Harry following obediently. Evan takes Harry through the front gate and then down the side of the Kellys’ house, where nobody is home, so they can at last have a private conversation.
Dish: Stand by. Incoming rueful thoughts Harry Baumgarten.
Galah: Roger.
Harry Baumgarten: I let Evan Johnson believe that I had slept with his wife because – because when I was at school, an expensive school for boys, it was important to blend in. Not just important, but essential. Or so it seemed at the time. In order to fit in, I began to pretend that I had a girlfriend. This pretence became a habit that continued well beyond the point of necessity. I was like one of those Japanese soldiers who kept fighting in the jungle long after the end of the war. That camouflaged, jungle self was beyond reason, beyond coherent thought; he only knew how to continue.
When I met Evan Johnson for the first time, when he told me
about the galahs and the chook wire listening to the universe, I found myself admiring his forearms, his hands, his calves. Suddenly, I was sinking into quicksand, hanging on for dear life to the neck of a bottle of home-fermented grappa. Evan himself was impossible, but perhaps something nearby – something complicated residing in the general area – could produce enough noise and confusion to take up that space. Something like Linda Johnson.
The kernel of truth was that I did, indeed, love her – as a friend, a sister. I enjoyed her company. We could talk all afternoon. I missed her and enjoyed the fact that I missed her. I even thought, for a moment, that there might be something to it, some small possibility that I could walk into that shaft of sunlight other people so carelessly walked in. But there wasn’t.
When I met her again, years later, it was all about feminism and freedom and – without being personal, because we weren’t quite ready for that – the campaign to repeal the sodomy laws.
Evan Johnson taps me on the shoulder. I’m holding forth about a termite mound and a cattle dog. I’m a long way from the end of my story so I turn and nod to include him in the story while indicating that I will be with him in a moment, but surprisingly, rudely, he interrupts and says, ‘Come with me, Harry.’
The others melt away. I see that his eyes are bleary, his hair thin. His shoulders are hunched under his shirt. There are the beloved golden hairs on his forearms. There is the cigarette packet in his pocket. We’re walking down the dark driveway into the Kellys’ backyard. He is speaking in tongues about kangaroos and space suits. He asks me if I slept with his wife while he was away at Goddard. And all the time since, on and off, right under his nose.
At this, the fighting Japanese soldier within rears up to do his duty, sword slicing through the air. Quick as a flash, he performs the illusion of a straight man cornered over a caged galah by an enraged husband. I don’t lie. I don’t have to. All you have to do to maintain an illusion is leave the illusions of others undisturbed. In this way, one might create a plausible girlfriend; one might conduct a whole affair with a married woman.
‘So did you?’ he shouts at me. Surely this can be heard across the fences.
I say nothing. I stand there, looking at him, struck dumb.
‘Well fuck off then,’ he says.
I walk away. I walk out of that driveway, and get into my car, and drive away. I loved birds, and because I loved them, I felt I couldn’t have them. So I studied insects and performed the part of the happy entomologist.
Dish: Over.
Galah: Roger that.
I was spending the evening alone, as usual, listening to the music and hilarity two doors down. And then, out of the dark, Harry Baumgarten and Evan Johnson materialised on either side of my cage. Mr Johnson was drunk. I recognised the symptoms from my studies of Mr Kelly. I’d seen him fall over near the back door and stay there until dawn, until Mrs Kelly hissed at him to get himself up and shower himself down.
I began to wonder if Mr Johnson was not drunk, but crying. I had seen children cry and Mrs Kelly cry. I had never seen an adult man cry. Mr Johnson was snuffling and blowing his nose. For a few seconds he stood in front of Dr Baumgarten without saying anything. He slowly scrunched his handkerchief into a ball and put it into his pocket. Then he got it out again. Mr Johnson tipped slightly sideways. Harry Baumgarten put out an arm to stop his fall; Evan Johnson shrugged it off and held on to the verandah post.
‘Just tell me straight out,’ said Evan Johnson, looking at me but addressing Harry Baumgarten. ‘When I was at Goddard. When I was at Goddard you –’
‘Oh heavens,’ murmured Harry Baumgarten, also looking at me.
‘You did, didn’t you, you miserable piece of slime?’ said Evan Johnson.
‘Heavens, heavens,’ said Harry Baumgarten.
‘Sod off!’ yelled Evan Johnson. ‘Sod off out of my sight!’
Dr Baumgarten turned and walked away. Guiltily, I thought.
Evan Johnson called after him: ‘And don’t even think about coming fishing with us, you slimy bastard.’
I was missing Dr Baumgarten already. I sensed I’d never see him again. Never be seen.
Then Evan Johnson dropped to his knees beside my cage. He draped an arm over it, as if hugging me to him. I could smell the alcohol rising off him.
‘You know what, cocky?’ he said. ‘Stella’s not my little girl.’ He said this cheerfully, as if he didn’t mind. But I could see that he did mind.
‘Bad luck,’ I wanted to say, but I didn’t have that phrase in my repertoire.
I said softly: ‘Dance?’
The Saturday after the Moon Landing, all the Kellys, and Evan Johnson, and other tracker families, go on a fishing trip to the Blowholes. Stella and Jo are dismayed when they discover that they won’t be going along as planned; they’ll be staying at home with Linda. As Evan carries things out to a colleague’s car, he doesn’t look at anyone: not Linda, not Jo, not Stella. The tone of the household has descended to a low growl with deep, sub-auditory vibrations.
Linda promises to paint the girls’ nails. This is no match for a weekend at the Blowholes, but they nod their heads, intuiting something about the growl.
It is Jo’s job, over this quiet weekend, to feed and water the Kellys’ galah. She expects to make five cents on completion of this task. She forgets all about it within minutes of waving goodbye to the multitude of arms and legs sticking out of the windows of the convoy of cars leaving Clam Street. Linda, submerged in the growl, also forgets. She boils and cools cabbage leaves and talks to the tadpoles.
Stella wants to play with the Crazy Camel Train. Jo tells her she’s too young, she’ll break it or lose the pieces. Stella begins to cry. Linda shouts: ‘Stop it, for God’s sake! Get away from each other if you’re just going to squabble.’
There are no Kellys to go and play with. The three are stuck with each other. Linda has an ‘atrocious’ headache. The house and kitchen are a post-party bombsite. There are piles of prawn shells and cigarette butts in breakfast bowls. There is a smear of tomato sauce, looking like blood, on the cream shag-pile rug.
Linda drops Jo off at a school friend’s house on a banana plantation and takes Stella shopping.
Out on the plantation, among the banana plants, it’s bright and cheerful, a relief. Jo spends hours with her plantation friend, playing gently with dolls, sucking on raspberry cordial icy poles made in the freezer. The girls bring their icy poles inside, against the rules, and get the sticky red stuff on a bedsheet and spend some time in the bathroom, trying to clean just a small area and then dunking the whole thing in the bath and getting into trouble. After the dust has settled, they draw pictures of fairies and witches and label them ferry and which. Jo is uneasy about these spellings and tries various alternatives, none of which satisfy.
Stella hunkers down under a tamarind tree that grows in the middle of the wide main road where people park their cars. She picks up a pod, peels it open and licks it the way children do in Port Badminton. This is an activity, like elastics or hand-clapping games, that children teach each other, circumventing the world of adults. The soft brown substance that clings to the seeds is sour like a lemon, causing Stella’s face to involuntarily contort as she licks. It is so sour! She licks again and lets her face contort, again.
Over there, on the other side of the wide quiet road, Linda emerges from the butcher’s shop and stops to talk to a man, the local Dogger, who is standing beside his dusty Land Rover. Then Linda tosses back her hair and walks towards the car, the white paper roll of meat from the butcher in her hand, her handbag over her shoulder. Stella drops the pod and scrambles into the passenger seat.
‘He wanted to sell me a rabbit,’ says Linda as she gets in behind the wheel.
Stella is thrilled.
‘Has he got rabbits? Can we get a –’
‘Dead ones, for meat.’
‘Oh, yuck.’
‘Did I see you licking a pod?’ Linda is lighting a cigarette, putting her handbag down, starting the car.
‘I was just picking one up to have a look at it. I was just having a close look at the seeds.’
‘You know it’s been lying on the ground, don’t you? A dog probably weed all over it and then you put it in your mouth. When we get home you’re going to clean your teeth.’
‘But I didn’t lick it!’
At home again, as Linda cleans the house, it occurs to Stella that she has untrammelled access to the Crazy Camel Train.
She goes into Jo’s room and stands there for a moment, surveying the space. The room has a rich swampy smell coming from the tadpoles’ ice-cream container. She sits down at Jo’s homework desk. There is a map of the world on its smooth laminated top.
Stella puts her finger into the open mouth of Shark Bay, just as she has seen Jo do. She opens the drawer on the right-hand side of the desk and examines Jo’s wooden ruler, sharpened pencils and her pink glue pot. She opens a small cardboard box of wax crayons, lining them up in different orders until she is satisfied with black, dark blue, light blue, green, yellow, orange and red. She puts them back in the box as neatly as she can. As she puts the box back, her fingers touch soft fabric. She tugs at it. Wrapped in one of Evan’s handkerchiefs are the coloured plastic monkeys and camels of the Crazy Camel Train. Stella lines them up along the dotted line of the equator, putting the first-class monkey in his top hat first and the economy-class monkeys on a four-humped camel at the end. The collection includes the extra signal box camel still in its cellophane.
Stella carries the precious object over to Jo’s bed. She knows she’s going to open it. As soon as she knows this, she is opening it. She goes at it with her milk teeth, tearing through the plastic.
The Lucky Galah Page 17