I was not altogether surprised when, soon after, the screen doors opened slightly wider and Alex herself squeezed through without an effort. Hilda swears her mother is suffering from anorexia. To me she simply pulls herself together at intervals, and enjoys the sensual pleasure of running her hands down her sides, over rib-cage, hips, thighs, of a figure perfect for its age.
Her naked lips offered us a thin smile, as disbelieving as the one we should have returned. Fond as I am of Alex, I am so bad at portraying the social emotions – like Alex herself.
She began by saying, ‘You know all about the tour, Patrick, because Hilda is too honest not to have forwarded my account of it.’
‘Yes, I know something of it.’ I had to admit.
‘And will-believe, or disbelieve, as much of the truth we both have learnt to accept.’
‘Of course,’ I answer.
At the same time I try to propel myself out of the chair with the help of my stick in deference to one I so much admire.
‘Don’t, Patrick,’ she advised.
She draws out a little do-it-yourself stool-table with scruffy mat which has beeen standing centre against the veranda wall for the convenience of her cats when they indulge in bird- or stranger-watching from the sphinx position.
She seated herself on the edge of this cheap furniture. She was wearing a simple ageless suit in bleached linen which matched her mood perfectly.
‘Surely not Chanel?’
‘Who else? She lasts for ever if you’re not foolish enough to give her to St Vincent de Paul or the Opportunity Shop.’
She is without jewels. She notices me looking her over and my glance focused at last on the wedding ring.
‘Something one can’t get rid of. I’ve been the bride so often I’m keeping it for the final mistake.’
Silence falls. One wonders how she has ended up amongst the asters, the petunias, the phlox, the silver-eyes and bulbuls of suburbia.
I try to turn our attention from the reality of our immediate surroundings to the fantasy life we have helped her create for herself.
‘At least you’ve got through your theatrical tour without any obvious wounds.’
‘If they’re not obvious, that’s all to the good. I wouldn’t hide them from you or anybody else. I have always respected what is real.’
Again a silence, broken only by birds and plants.
‘It was an experience, to say the least. I met some entrancing kids,’ her teeth masticating the term were those of a true gourmet of language. ‘They understood me – I think – as many of you don’t.’
She looked at us and away with the pursed mouth and pouting cheeks of a child expecting the grown-ups to accuse her of what they call an un-truth.
She might have been preparing to blow a raspberry in our faces, but I didn’t give her time.
‘Now that you’re rested, I expect you’re preparing for a next – a different phase in your never-ending career.’
Rested she certainly looked. She might have spent the whole of her ‘tour’ sitting upstairs, buffing her nails, brushing and touching up her immaculate helmet of youthful hair, then getting into the Chanel suit for her entrance on the veranda to impress her captive audience of two.
I might have caught her out. Hilda looked as though she thought I was being dishonest.
Alex only hesitated a second, sighed, and squared her Chanel shoulders. ‘Actually, the theatre hasn’t washed me up. I’ve been engaged by the Sand Pit. I have a contract for small parts and walk-ons.’
She sat rocking on the edge of the do-it-yourself table, tapping the toe of a court shoe against the veranda tiles. The glacé shoe’s rat-a-tat on terracotta specked with grey-white sparrow droppings, insisted on the truth of what she had told us.
She laughed, exposed her throat to Heaven and blurted, ‘They say bird shit brings luck!’
Overhead, tunnels of spiders’ web, grey and dusty as geriatric armpits and pubics.
I didn’t know about the Sand Pit, I had to confess.
‘Strange, when it’s never out of the news. Innovative theatre – so-called. The audience is confounded by actors rising up live out of the sand where they must have been buried for what seems like several hours.’
‘Nothing innovative in sand. Beckett used it years ago.’
‘And will go on till he’s ground humanity down to its last grain of significance. The Chinese Emperors dropped to the possibilities of sand long before Beckett. They buried their entourage live in the stuff. Then, what about the Desert Fathers? They recognised the mortifying properties of sand. And with due respect to all of them Alex Gray accepts sand, silence, and nothingness as the possible way to something more positive than life.’
She paused, perhaps to enjoy my surprise. She was never much of a scholar, while always ready to exalt her instinct.
Through a grille of teeth, yellower than we had noticed earlier, she added a few last words to her lecture, ‘I know from having spent much of my life up to the neck in burning sand – by choice, I should say – when not buried completely and forcibly by my Chinese torturers. Now you will tell the world I am mad!’
On this note of triumph she left us to what she saw as our distress.
I am now so busy at the Sand Pit the events I record can only appear erratic impressions. Perhaps I misread my contract, but I did not realise some of my roles at the theatre would be those of barmaid and lavatory cleaner. I don’t know which is more difficult, dealing with actual excrement, or facing human shit the other side of the counter.
Shan’t let on to Patrick and Hilda about these aspects of my life as an actor. Of course they may riffle through my papers behind my back, break into my writing-case however successfully I persuade myself I have hidden it. I believe neither of them knows about the priest hole under the eaves with its never-fading reek of dead possum and the Mystic’s B.O. Age and arthritis have deprived Patrick of any but the wheelchair approach to exploration, but little Hilda has a nose for smells.
As my blue flesh mops and slops around through the stench of carbolic and urine, the hissing and pissing of the Sand Pit’s stainless-steel lavatories, there’s always the graffiti to enjoy: If I’m up the director Monday no one can call me a poof cos I fuck me Auntie Friday night. I have strict orders from the management to scrub it off, but it won’t somehow come. Other info is more general: You can’t say herpes isn’t a means of communication. And no one can deny that charitable hearts aren’t still around in this all-for-me society of ours: Togetherness is a full bed ring Lady Mary Zipfinger 32432 at her million dollar Darling Point penthouse if you’re looking for a good time … Mind you, I don’t go along with porn, but you’ve got to agree that a larf is therapeutic.
Once when I had scarcely stripped off my pink rubber gloves, grabbed a wedge of quiche, and stationed my falling arches behind the foyer bar, I caught sight of a ghost from the past.
‘Isn’t that you, Craig?’ I called, recognising the sinewy, rather hairy arms and Byzantine beard of the manager-director of my Arts Council sponsored tour of the outback. He looked at me as though he had never seen me before. Well, one does meet an awful lot of people. Memory deludes as one grows older. But Craig isn’t old. He ought to recognise.
He flicks his head. ‘Gotter sort out the membership forms from the new set of free programmes.’ He appeared harassed.
‘Thought you’d be working backstage, Craig.’
It was only later, when he was chatting up some of the prettier foyer dollies and helping geriatric deformities mount the stairs that I realised he was an usher.
Or was it Craig? Any more than I am I?
Here is my little friend Linda. She at least will recognise me. Or will she? Perhaps she saw how hurt I was when she took over my seat next to the driver in Van No. I as they left Ochtermochty. Perhaps she and Craig fell out soon after. Tonight they seem bent on avoiding each other.
Sometimes I think it’s a case of glass eyes. From observing people I believe almost eve
rybody has one. Including myself. But nobody could have two, could they? I have heard my own eye go clunk as I drop it into Grandfather Gray’s little agate cup which I have stood in the icon corner and where so many visitors (particularly friends) stub their cigarettes. I didn’t know how anybody could mistake this little cup in transparent agate for an ashtray, standing as it is in front of the icons. Perhaps they wish to express their contempt for saints. Nobody could guess that this is where I drop my eye to give the socket a rest. They could, I suppose, have it in mind, and foresee how ash will irritate the socket when I replace my eyeball. Friends often know better than enemies how to hurt. This is why Hilda and I, who are worse than friends – mother and daughter – have such a disastrous effect on each other.
All this about glass eyes got into my head tonight on catching sight of my former friend Linda. I would not have expected her to recognise me straight off. Hair makes a lot of difference and tonight I have this gel stiffening my orange Mohican hair-do.
Going as Alice in Wonderland, poor Linda looks out of it beside the gelled-up barmaid. She is holding her escort by the biceps as he leads her towards the bar. Admittedly he’s a real dish, but she needn’t be holding him that tight, he shows no signs of wanting to escape. He is about to buy her a drink and a wedge of quiche or slice of our nutritious carrot cake. It is then I get the idea that Linda has, not one glass eye, but two. She could not have looked so glassy even if doped to the gills, as I knew from old she frequently is. I was longing to bring up Ochtermochty, Cutncumagen, Pee Wee Plains, Baggary Baggary et al. when the tall guy who is leading her turns to her and asks.
‘What do you fancy, Edwina?’
And she answers without any hesitation, ‘I could knock back a Margarita if I’ve got to sit through this lousy show.’
‘Two Margaritas,’ the guy orders, he has these dark sideburns, greying at the cheekbones.
‘Won’t you join us?’ he asks the barmaid.
There was nothing I would have liked better, to down a couple of Margaritas, and end up swinging from the iron-grey bugger-grips, but I wasn’t sure it was part of the management’s policy for the barmaid to socialise with the customers so early in the evening.
So I gave him my nicest smile, and refused. After I’d fixed the Margaritas, running the salt round the rim of the glass as I had seen it done and pouring more tequila than I ought, I poured myself a glass of chlorinated tap water to show I meant to be sociable.
‘An Indian friend’, I confided, ‘taught me years ago how to extract the prana from a glass of water.’
They both stared. I wondered whether I should have thrown in the ‘years ago’: they could have started seeing me as some old bag who had been on the India circuit, when this evening I was feeling so young and supple.
‘And how do you’, asks Linda/Edwina, ‘extract whatever from a glass of water?’
‘It’s a matter of will power,’ I reply.
Perhaps I sounded a bit smug. Anyway, they freeze as though I suspect them of something unmentionable.
I decided it was time to ask Linda about the tour.
‘When I first set eyes on you,’ I said, and may have dropped a clanger mentioning eyes, ‘I was sure you were Linda – Smallwood, isn’t it? The actress.’
‘No, I’m Edwina.’ She looked glassier than ever. ‘Edwina’s the name my mother gave me. I can’t say I’m not an actress, though – on and off – more off than on,’ she glares at me, ‘like most of us.’
So I was put in my place.
Darcy, the friend (he’s a real Darcy) makes some attempt at conversation.
But there’s more in the air, I begin to sense, than the rigor mortis which has set in between a couple of actresses. For some time Cloris (she’s the S.M.) has been stamping out through the foyer to the front entrance, and looking anxiously up and down the street. Something tells me an important actor hasn’t turned up.
Chris – no, Clark (the director) appears and calls me out from behind the bar. What’s this, I wonder? Is it because I haven’t scrubbed the graffiti off their bloody old lavatory walls?
But no! ‘Anne Brinkman-Smijth’, he whispers, ‘hasn’t showed up, and it looks like she won’t. We’ve called her at her Vaucluse home, and her parents’ place at Jamberoo.’
‘What of it?’ I ask, trembling at every extremity.
‘You can’t say it’s an important part. But a lot depends on it, Alex.’
I knew all about Anne Brinkman-Smijth (the j in Smith far more important than the part). She had a body, and could emote like nobody else in the business when she was in the mood.
‘You, Alex, will have to stand in.’
‘But I don’t know the lines.’
‘There’s only one and it’s unforgettable.’
Actually, I’d heard it, sailing out over and over at rehearsals.
‘All you’ve got to say,’ says Clark, ‘is, “I am the spirit of the land, past, present, and future.”’
He, and by now, Cloris, were dragging me towards the dressing room. They stripped me of my clothes and got me into the white mosquito-net nightie, a bit grey from sandpit sand, which Brinkman-Smijth wears for her part. They dragged me out into the still-deserted sandpit and began digging a grave. Normally I haven’t a nerve in my body. I’ve been through so much.
‘Now,’ they explain, ‘all you have to do is lie still, hold the snorkel in your mouth after you’ve been covered up, and listen for your cue. This will come from Brian …’
Brian is a big bushy Irish convict with marks of the cat all over his back.
‘You’ll hear his chains clink closer and closer, till he hollers, “So much for the humanity of English gentlemen and bullies.” Then you spring up from out of the sand, deliver your line, and Benno here will whirl you round his shoulders.’
I was so confused, I let them push me into the grave and bury me alive, while I hung on for dear life to my cardboard exhaust pipe.
During the centuries which followed, there was much coming and going, and clanking of so many chains, I wondered whether I had missed my cue. I passed the time praying to Our Lady and the Panayia, not forgetting the Holy Ghost, and adding a few saints I remember from the Acts. I’m all for acts.
All of you, I pray from the depths of the grave, I don’t want to – DIE!
My teeth must almost have bitten through the lower end of the snorkel, which added to my terror of death by asphyxiation. My itching eyeballs long to watch another sunrise through the holmoaks, palms, and bunya bunya pines, above the convents and the lone Protestant church, which screen the ocean. I must take part in another of those damp, salt-heavy dawns where the sticky hibiscus trumpets a hope which may or may not be fulfilled.
Mortal life, I am convinced, is more than I can sacrifice to an artistic death at the Sand Pit Theatre. If I don’t get a move on, Benno’s big black spongy heel may stamp out my limited air supply. So, regardless of whether I’m forestalling my cue I spring out shrieking, instead of the line I had been given, ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life,’ whereupon Benno, the archetype Aborigine from somewhere Wilcannia way, with a dash of Sephardic from the Gold Coast, grabs me and whirls me around his shoulders. The Sand Pit audience, each member probably an unbeliever on principle, is so startled by the unorthodox message, as well as my unexpected appearance, lets out a sustained gasp. Are they supposed to laugh? I suspect no one has ever dared at a venue for serious, innovative drama like the Sand Pit. But finally they can’t contain themselves, and as Benno whirls me always higher towards the girders in my grotty mosquito-net, all-revealing nightie, the audience unites in the kind of roar which lays them in the aisles, theatre parties – and our less responsible critics – at Her Majesty’s and the Royal.
God knows how it might have ended if …
As it happened, it ended on my own wrinkled bed, at what hour of morning I could not have told, except that outside the misted panes there was a corn-coloured moon in a sky of jacaranda blue. Corny. I don’t doubt, b
ut as real as anything that passes for reality. So I lay sobbing awhile amongst the estuaries and craters that many nights of self-doubt and despair had mapped on the sheet.
Then I got up. I had to read today’s bulletin on myself before my daughter came in, gave me the once over, and let me know what I stood for in her eyes and those of the ‘normal’ world.
According to the vision of myself in the glass I could not be dismissed as a geriatric nut. Certainly ravaged, I still radiated the strength of will of those who are being saved up for some final scene in the terrifying theatre of life. You couldn’t refer to ‘death’, as Hilda and Patrick might if they dared abandon their bourgeois discretion.
I raised my arms. They are still wiry enough to swing from a trapeze. Nests of little black snakes raise their heads from each armpit. I exercise my hands, my fingers. They are not so arthritic they could not handle a gun, take aim, and pull the trigger on a chosen target.
I can hear Hilda across the landing, turning in the last of her early morning dreams. I must hurry. I grab some liner from out of the chaos on my dressing-table top. I elongate the shape of my eyes. Why, I wonder? To give myself the confidence no one but myself knows I lack? Now I am the great archetypal bird who can face any darkness I’m expected to.
I try not to thump the stairs as I make my way down to the kitchen. Though without appetite, I must try to make a show of eating breakfast before Hilda arrives and forces something nauseating on me. I am too old to cope with morning sickness. She shouldn’t object to my appearance. I am wearing a simple voile nightdress of long ago – nothing see-through about it. I help myself to a handful of cornflakes from the pantry, souse them in virtuous milk, and to give myself heart, add some of the cheap brandy Hilda keeps as a medicine, when, oh God, I smash the bottle by knocking it off the table. I dispose of the fragments of glass by shuffling them out of sight with my feet.
Hilda is coming. I hear her on the stairs. Nothing can be done in time about the spilt brandy, a dark amber lake laced with blood from my wounded feet spreading across the kitchen floor. I sit down hoping Hilda will not yet have rubbed the sleep from her eyes. I crouch above my doctored conflakes and milk.
Memoirs of Many in One Page 13