Leaving the station, she realised that her first class for the day, at a school in Cinnamon Gardens, should have started ten minutes ago; there would be trouble about that. Also, she would have to pay someone to mend her bag.
Backed up against a wall, a kitten was arching itself at a crow—a small kitten and a large crow. Barely interrupting her stride, Christabel picked up the kitten by his scruff. ‘You are sentenced to life,’ she said and stowed him in her broken bag.
Kiki’s house was in a lane that ran off a busy road. If Christabel walked up to the top of the lane of an evening, there were always people standing around. She would look up and see the moon riding high, as white as a life cut back to the bone. There was usually a scattering of sugary stars. Further along the road, several small buildings had been razed to make way for a multistorey office block. Fa used to say, ‘We are being demolished into the future,’ whenever he saw an old place pulled down. But work had come to an indefinite halt on the construction site. People would hang about across the road in the evenings, staring at walls that had risen no higher in months. These people were servants, or kept huddled shops, or emerged from the huts that lined a nearby canal. The clearing of the site, the work of construction, the uncertain outcome—in short, the drama of the office block—provided a distraction from hardship and need. Suspended between optimism and melancholy, the building stood for life itself. And then, the incomplete walls and jutting steel rods consoled with proof that the rich, too, had their difficulties and deserved compassion. Christabel thought, All around me are ordinary people and I am ordinary like them. For some weeks, this immersion in humanity brought intense satisfaction: a radiant exaltation, in fact. The smell of cheap cigarettes, the whining folk song issuing from a radio, the workers clinging to buses like maggots to a carcass, even a panting, woolly dog who appeared from nowhere one evening and sped along the pavement, scattering bystanders: everything inspired the joyful exclamation, I am ordinary!
After a while, however, there was no comfort in the thought; on the contrary, it was a blow directed at Moth and Fa. Christabel remembered ‘a brilliant company’. But that life had gone forever. She could barely recall it; it was Fa who had harped on about it when it was over, like someone determined to recount a dream. There was really only the future: unfinished, looming in the dark. Christabel told herself that it would hold happiness as well as sorrow—in books, it held everything. ‘Life is long,’ she murmured, as she walked back down the lane. She was not even forty. There was still time for everything to change.
But there were evenings when a terrible, silent cry filled the garage: Oh, my life! It was before her eyes, a clear spring leaping from its source, winding aimlessly downhill and gathering murk until it disappeared into a cleft where it surged and moaned unseen. No one used or directed its power. Napoleon mewed silently on her lap, showing her the roof of his mouth. Christabel asked him, ‘Do you entertain illusions?’ She kissed his cruel, furry cheeks.
A servant ran out from the house to say that Christabel was wanted on the phone. Kiki was waiting with both chins held high. ‘How you disappoint me,’ she said to the air beside Christabel’s left ear. ‘You know very well that this number is for business purposes only.’ She pointed to the thick black receiver waiting on the desk and glided out to eavesdrop in the hall.
‘But how did you know where to find me?’ Christabel asked afterwards, when she was installed in Bunty’s house in Sydney.
‘Sizzle.’
‘But how did he know?’
‘I don’t know.’
Where had Bunty, who had failed everything at school, learned bookkeeping? When Christabel arrived in Sydney, she found Bunty overseeing the accounts of an Italian who imported tiles. Every Christmas, Mr Valente gave her a panforte and an envelope stuffed with cash. ‘I usually leave the panforte in a park,’ said Bunty. ‘But I thought you might like it.’
Christabel didn’t.
They thought greedily of the Christmas cakes of home: stuffed with sweet spices, moist.
Christabel had three excellent, useless A Levels. ‘I’ve taught elocution since I was twenty,’ she said. ‘And I can do invisible mending.’ Bunty borrowed a typewriter from work and gave Christabel a book called Teach Yourself Typing. Christabel practised at the kitchen table, feeling out the home keys with a tea towel over her hands.
Mr Valente, sleek in a close-fitting purple shirt, arrived at their house on Saturday with orchids to match. He was shiny all over: shoes, teeth, eyes. Bunty came up the passage in one of the tidy blouses and jail-coloured skirts she wore to work; her insteps overflowed her shoes. She was going to the races at Randwick with Mr Valente. As soon as they left the house, Christabel scurried to the front window and spied. Mr Valente touched Bunty’s elbow and unlocked the passenger door of his Mercedes. His gleaming head was half the size of Bunty’s.
‘He wants to marry you,’ said Christabel when Bunty returned. Hadn’t she seen his juicy eyes? Her life with Bunty, barely begun, was already at an end. She had spent the day picturing herself banished to Bunty and Mr Valente’s garage: it had amenities, being Australian, and shag pile. He only comes up to her armpit, she thought, full of spite.
‘He already has a wife,’ said Bunty, removing her watch. It had a plain brown strap and was the only jewellery she wore. She had kept the silent repose Christabel associated with large things: mountains, cathedrals. What she did say—like the revelation that Mr Valente was married—often pointed only to a wider and obscure story. Once, when they were making their way home through a green uninteresting park, Bunty looked across the road to a building with a rickety balcony and said that it reminded her of the shop-house in which she had lived in Kuala Lumpur. Somehow it was impossible to ask what she had been doing there, and when.
Bunty called her front room the soft room because the chairs in the other rooms were hard. The soft room was where she watched TV, listened to her radio and kept her bottle of scotch. She never indicated by word or sign that she wanted to be left alone, but sometimes the air around her would grow cold. Then she existed, just as she had done at school, in the centre of an inviolable ring.
They would lie in their beds and talk across the dark. Christabel spoke about Len casually, calling him ‘an old flame’. She described him as ‘one of those men who have their head in the clouds’. ‘One of those men’ pleased her, suggesting depths of experience and worldly wisdom. ‘His socks sagged,’ she told Bunty. ‘I wonder how he managed to withstand those winters.’
‘In Russia,’ said Bunty, ‘the peasants drape themselves across stoves. I was told that in Hong Kong by a girl who had grown up in Harbin. Her father was Chinese, and her mother was Russian. She was very subtle. She could express an opinion and its opposite, and believe both. She pointed out such a frightening thing once: “The only life in which you play a leading role is your own.”’
It was an informative speech for Bunty. Christabel wanted to know: What happened to the girl? Was she beautiful? What were you doing in Hong Kong?
‘She knew the strangest people,’ went on Bunty. ‘There was a Chinese student who believed he was a genius, marked for stupendous things. One summer he was visited repeatedly by a ghostly monk. These visits inspired him to do great—’
‘That’s a famous story!’ interrupted Christabel. ‘A Russian story. When the man is cured of his visions, he becomes ordinary and dull. Your friend obviously stole the whole thing.’
‘She was happy telling it, and I was happy listening.’
‘Was it Raven who had a Chinese girlfriend? Or Sizzle?’
‘Raven had a motorbike,’ said Bunty.
Weeks went by.
Bunty said, ‘Raven rode his bike into a tree. He killed himself and his girlfriend—she might have been Chinese.’
‘How awful!’ cried Christabel. ‘Your poor father!’
She heard the creaking that said Bunty was settling herself to sleep.
The sunglasses were the first pair Christab
el had owned. The lenses were shaped like black glass eggs. Bunty’s had thin gold frames and Christabel’s were tortoiseshell. ‘How glamorous we are!’ cried Bunty. They lay on recliners in the yard, wearing their sunglasses, and couldn’t stop laughing.
On Wednesdays they went to the pictures after work.
That was what they said: ‘the pictures’.
Jone from Payroll handed Christabel the small brown envelope that contained her wages, and said, ‘We’re having a few people round for a barbie Sunday.’
Christabel prepared for the adventure with Touch and Glow, and a dress with a circular, gypsyish skirt. In Australia she was no longer Moth and Fa’s daughter but merely Christabel. She could wear three clashing bracelets, and no one would care.
‘The lovely lady, Christabel,’ quoted Bunty. She had slept late and was just coming out of the bathroom. Her dressing-gown, carelessly fastened, showed a long, pale slit from neck to thigh. ‘The lovely lady, Christabel / Whom her father loves so well. When we read that at school, I thought my name should have been Christabel.’
Jone and Rob had two foxies and half a house in Arncliffe. Christabel tasted champagne punch for the first time—delicious! She knocked it back, and picked the last white-hearted strawberry from the bottom of her glass.
Rob placed a thick chop and a thin sausage on Christabel’s paper plate, saying, ‘Wrap yourself around that.’ Sally from Customer Service passed the tomato sauce. She had spilled a thousand satin ruffles down her shirt.
When there were only a few blackened mint leaves left in a puddle of punch, Jone led Christabel to a cardboard cask. Christabel bravely said that the wine was lovely—suddenly, magically, it was. Without waiting to be asked, she refilled her glass. ‘Cheers, big ears!’ said Jone. She was glorious in a peacock and lime maxi, and a necklace of enamelled pink flowers.
Jone’s neighbour, Mike, was a small, handsome Englishman with square knees. He was in electricals. There were more Australians around the barbecue and lolling under a gum tree. The foxies went around licking toes. Mike had one of those new computer watches. Teeth fortified with fluoride bore down rhythmically on chops.
Everyone watched Christabel trying to vanquish a sausage with a splade.
‘Christabel’s from Sri Lanka,’ explained Jone.
With the moselle funnelling down, Christabel admitted, ‘I still forget to say Sri Lanka. Even though it’s been called that for seven years.’
Mike’s wife knew it had had a much nicer name once.
‘It was Ceylon until ’72.’
‘Oh, but Sri Lanka is lovely!’ said Jone.
‘I was born in India,’ said Mike. ‘That was when it was India, mind.’
‘Mike’s awful,’ said Jone to Christabel. ‘You’re awful, Mike!’ she cried and touched her hair at the rim. There were curls there, round with light.
‘Would you call that a stack perm?’ asked Mike’s wife. ‘My hairdresser suggested a stack perm. But I’ve never been a slave to passing fashions.’ She called, ‘Here, doggie!’ and dangled a length of snot-grey fat. A foxy snatched. ‘Manners!’ cried Mike’s wife. ‘Naughty, naughty boy! But so sweet to eat it all up!’
Sally strummed her ruffles. She was considering Transcendental Meditation.
Mike had a hamstring.
It was nothing to his wife’s underlapping toe.
‘What I’m wondering,’ confided Rob to Christabel, ‘is why you’re not wearing a sari.’
‘A sari is so feminine,’ said Jone, topping up Christabel’s glass. ‘Can you show me how to drape one, Chrissie?’
‘See, the great thing about your Asian bird is that she understands what a bloke needs. None of that libber rubbish,’ said Mike.
His wife said, ‘Well, excuse me.’
The flat-petalled flowers on a sprawling shrub were exactly the same shape and shade of pink as those around Jone’s throat. This correspondence between nature and art struck Christabel as nothing short of miraculous. Her eyes swivelled from necklace to flowers—a mistake. She sloshed the funny feeling down with more wine.
‘No one’s got any business making you feel ashamed of your heritage,’ went on Rob. He twisted his moustache and admitted, ‘I know we Aussies can be pretty crude.’ He refilled Christabel’s glass.
The flowers were open-faced, unsecretive. Christabel longed to know what they thought of her dress. Did the colour suggest boldness and originality? Or shellfish? One of her hooped earrings kept moving, so that a flash of silver rested on the rim of her eye.
Mike’s wife couldn’t go past a pav. She shattered meringue with a dreamy air.
Christabel felt really splendid. The sun came dazzling through the leaves. It commanded her to set down her plate. But she held on to her glass as she floated across buffalo grass to the beckoning pink. Rob followed, murmuring, ‘If you’ve been the victim of racial prejudice, Chrissie, you’ve only to let me know.’
Mike’s voice swelled like the afternoon. He had returned to India; it seemed to belong to him. ‘Take your Brahmin—a bundle of superstitions.’ He grew louder and more ecstatic as India gripped him, streamed through him. The porters! The drains!
A force larger than Christabel compelled her to kneel before the flowers. She drank to them, upending her glass. Her bracelets pulsed on her wrist. The flowers grew bigger and pinker and swirled.
Rob hosed away the vomit while the foxies danced around, now and then darting in for a slurp. His hands were big and cleanly formed. Later he placed Christabel across the back seat of his car, with a damp face-washer for her brow, and drove her home to St Peters, being careful how he took the bends. Power lines poured past the window. The pounding in Christabel’s head said, The brazen greaves. The brazen greaves. By the time they had reached the Princes Highway, it was saying, The blazing grief.
‘No trouble at all,’ said Rob, although she hadn’t spoken, shifting down into second to accommodate a bus.
Bunty came out of the soft room roaring, ‘O come, Olly Faithful!’ Her horse had won—she was joyful and triumphant.
Bunty’s voice had darkened. It was still full and true but no longer suggested other, limitlessly great things.
Jone’s sister was ill, and Jone was required in Cairns. Christabel came out of the lobby after work and into a stiff harbour breeze. She loved Sydney but not the few crooked miles that made up its chilly heart. Drawing her cardigan tight, she heard her name. Rob’s eyes were wild blue beams. His hand touched her arm, then settled on the nape of her neck.
A mate of his had a place near Chinatown. Christabel’s breasts were warm, round apples as she followed him up the stairs. Doors opened off each narrow landing: it was like climbing up through a hive. In one room, there seemed to be a party going on. On the next landing, Rosen’s Wholesale Buttons faced off against The Structuralist Bunyip Gallery. Rob unlocked a door, and they entered a room furnished with a piano and a couch. He took firm hold of Christabel, murmuring, ‘Teach me to explore darkness, Chrissie.’ She took it as a reference to the lack of light in the room.
As he jiggled, she decided that it was very odd and very nice, this business that outstripped ordinary existence without being quite like a dream. It was charged with the power and strangeness of novels: at once removed from and more vivid than life.
Rob’s hair was soft, thin, of an indeterminate colour. Foetus hair, Christabel thought, examining it from above.
Afterwards, he rose and parted the curtains. Christabel’s breasts were deflated balloons lying on her ribs. She fumbled for her cardi as Rob informed her with a touch of jubilation, ‘You’re the first.’ At which he grew shy and ducked his head. ‘My dark lady,’ he mumbled, straining the words through his moustache. Christabel understood then that she constituted an experiment. He had demonstrated, if only to his own satisfaction, that he was unburdened by racial prejudice. He grew expansive, offering her a cuppa—a gentleman! His ears, seen from behind as he investigated a cupboard, were innocently ajar. She lay there picturing all
the chops he would eat, slab after red slab, over the course of his life.
No experiment is valid unless reproducible. Four times more, they climbed up through the hive. Rob’s eyes continued to emit streams of lunatic blue light. Between their meetings, time passed in a daze—Christabel’s movements were heavy and slow, as on an afternoon of stupefying heat. Then Jone came back from Cairns.
The back door of Bunty’s house was directly in line with the front one. When the southerly brought relief at the end of a summer day, wind dashed through the house like a child.
Christabel had discovered the municipal library. She would go out to do some shopping and return with a bag of books, with which she would settle down at the kitchen table. In bad weather, whole weekends passed in the outrageous happiness of reading. When pain corkscrewed down her spine she walked up and down the passage. The neutral passage, running from the kitchen to the soft room, linked her domain with Bunty’s. They were connected but apart. Each, unconsciously, paused an instant on the other’s threshold. Rain came over the house, and the house took on the dimensions of a palace. The windows faced the wrong way or were shaded with verandas; daylight entered diffidently, slithering into the small rooms. Christabel didn’t notice: there was the soft brightness of candles and lamps. It was a house suited to the interior life, to dank winter afternoons and summer downpours. It surrounded Christabel, an echo of the old, warm world she had shared with Moth and Fa.
Bunty had bought it from a Mr Kingsley, who was going to live with his sister. He assured Bunty, ‘No one has died in this house. You won’t find any ghosts.’ Christabel knew that without being told. The house was friendly, scoured, all its noises were kind. In those days, she believed with Mr Kingsley that no one wanted ghosts.
The Life to Come Page 25