“So watch out, Sandra, I might still be a bit mad!”
“And children? Didn’t you want children?”
“Yes, I did, but Manny died and then there wasn’t anyone else. What about you?”
“Things don’t always work out,” said Sandra.
“No, not like we expect, anyway. And I wouldn’t have been a very good mother.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I just know, that’s all. Thanks for the tea, Sandra. I need to go now. I’ve got things to do.”
September
MARTHA WAS an independent woman but was aware that other people often needed her. At the moment it was Cliff, and perhaps that tight little woman called Sandra needed her too. Certainly she had needed a warm shawl in that shivery house.
In the past it had mainly been professional people: social workers, doctors, a psychiatrist, even a lawyer. Now she mainly cared for friends and neighbors, like the Iraqi family two doors up, or Mary Sherbet next door, or anyone else who happened along. She had a generous heart and what she called a “double-jointed head,” meaning she could simultaneously carry on a conversation and keep count of her knitting, which had been disconcerting for the lawyer.
As for the psychiatrist, he had wanted her to knit granny squares and had commissioned a rug. Martha had protested that granny squares were boring, but he had insisted. She must do something, he said, and she had once mentioned knitting. In the end she got better in spite of him.
Martha had a share-farming agreement with her brother, though times were hard on the farm. Thrifty and resourceful, she found she could manage well enough without drawing against her share of farm capital, but when her brother married, two women in the same kitchen proved impossible. Martha moved to her unit in Adelaide and began to knit in earnest, broadening her ideas by exploring galleries on weekends and finally landing the job knitting for the designer. It wasn’t long before her garments were selling in Sydney and Melbourne.
The psychiatrist caused Martha more distress than even Manny’s death, gradually eroding her self-confidence while purporting to do the opposite. In the years since hospital she wished she had been more robust and had stood up to him, demanding that he see her rather than a set of problematic quirks. It had taken Martha three unhappy years to realize what was happening and make her escape.
She wanted closure, so he got his granny squares, blacks and browns and grays, all neatly sewn together into a subversive knee rug full of slits, tucks, peaks, bobbles, twisted cords, and openwork medallions, here and there missing an entire square. The young man didn’t have enough knowledge to recognize art when he saw it, but Martha had a certain pleasure in charging him fifty dollars and saying goodbye. The wool had cost twenty, but never mind that. For good measure she made him a Christmas present, a balaclava without eye holes. He failed to see the joke.
But all that was long ago. Now other people needed her, and today it was Cliff needing company. He was interested in more than just her company, but Martha had told him firmly and politely that she wasn’t interested. She wasn’t closed to the idea, she said, but she wasn’t one to go looking.
“You are very nice, Cliffy,” she said. “But I don’t think you’re really my type. I’d like to be friends, though, if you can cope with that.” He hadn’t quite got the message yet, but he would sooner or later.
It was opening day for the annual agricultural expo, the Royal Adelaide Show. Cliff and Martha stood in the queue, excited as a couple of teenagers. It was good to get there early, said Martha, when everything was clean and sparkling and the salespeople were still smiling because their feet had not begun to hurt.
Martha took only twenty dollars, knowing that if she took more she’d spend it. Besides, the things she really cared about, like the animal nursery and the knitting displays, were free. Cliff had gone to the bank and taken out eighty dollars, but he’d blown seventy by lunchtime, throwing red balls down the open mouths of head-wagging clowns, tossing hoops at deceptively angled hooks, and shooting at ducks with cockeyed rifles. Martha steered them toward the hot-dog van so that Cliff would have something to eat before he spent the lot. She understood his total disregard for money. Cliff was not one to think about accumulating wealth or goods. He traveled light, he said, and all his goods could be rolled up in a blanket. Martha knew that he often gave money to street kids, to save them getting it by other means. As for his gambling, his pleasure was more in the anticipation than in the winning. If you had somewhere dry to sleep, clothes to wear, and occasional food, life was hunky-dory. He played the slots a little, but he liked the horses and scratch tickets better. He had his own moral code—never borrow to bet—though he often ran out of cash well before pension day.
After lunch they had an argument about what to see next. Cliff wanted to see the cars and the farm machinery. His grandfather had been a farmer, and Cliff liked to think he had farming in his blood. Martha, who really did have farming in her blood, was far more interested in the knitting and embroidery. They decided to split up and meet later by the fountain at the front of the main hall.
But it was Cliff, on his way to the farm machinery, who found knitting first, though not the kind Martha sought. It was in the sales pavilion for electric appliances. At first he thought the strange machine was a musical instrument, but then he saw the threads of wool strung through shiny hooks and realized that the demonstrator, pushing a handle back and forth across the machine, was making fabric like Martha’s knitting, which mysteriously emerged from underneath. He stood and watched, mesmerized by the steady rhythm.
“Interested in knitting machines?”
Ah. A knitting machine. He could see the pattern now, a complicated symmetry of several colors.
The demonstrator saw she would never make a sale here, but she had no other buyers, and he seemed genuinely interested in what she was doing. She smiled at him, which gave Cliff the courage to ask a question.
“How long does it take to do a row?”
“This long.” Whoosh. The demonstrator laughed at the look on his face. “Quicker than the wife can do a row, hey?”
“I’m not married.”
“Well, your girlfriend then. Why don’t you buy her one?”
“I’d have to save up.”
“Well, you save up then. And when you’ve got enough, you ring me. Here’s my card.”
Cliff patted the little pink card into his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap, then bowed to the woman, which made her laugh. Right. Time for the farm machinery.
MARTHA was lost among the flowers. She felt trapped in the long rows of white tablecloths, with their equally long rows of flowers in bottles and jars. She wanted to get to the knitting, but she couldn’t seem to get past camellias and daffodils. She didn’t want to waste this time alone, away from Cliff, a time when she could look at things she wanted to see, but she couldn’t find her way out. She couldn’t remember which direction to go in for the knitting, and whenever she got to a doorway she saw the wrong building outside, so she was forced back among flowers she didn’t want to see: camellias perched unnaturally on plates like the bodiless heads of babies, rows of daffodils mocking her from their evenly spaced glass bottles, spiky cacti leering through their prickles, bonsai crouching, elegantly forlorn in their ceramic dishes of tiny gravel.
But then there were roses. Martha’s racing heart slowed. Of all the flowers, these were the most comforting and familiar, the flowers her mother had nurtured between the house and the veggie patch, fenced from marauding cows.
Pink roses, red roses, yellow roses, roses blue and purple like bruises. Roses so dark they were almost black. Martha began to read the names. A large red rose with wide white stripes was called Hurdy Gurdy, just right for the show, and a wine-purple Old Port made her think briefly of Cliff. But it was the pink roses that caught her attention. Soft Celestial, with its heavenly name, the large pink plates of Echo, the shy blush double blooms of First Love. Madame President was strongly pink and be
autiful, but the name made Martha laugh. That would be the day. A woman president for Australia.
And then she saw it, a rose called Martha, a generous, open-hearted rose, a delicate pink, but strong and clear, part of a display called Old Garden Varieties. She picked up a brochure and read slowly through the column until she found it.
MARTHA: a sport of ‘Zéphirine Drouhin’. Introduced in 1912. A climbing Bourbon. Grows up to 3 meters. Thornless. Vigorous, long-flowering, healthy. Perfumed. Not commonly found.
A rose called Martha. She could hardly believe it. But here it was in writing, in the middle of the Royal Adelaide Show. Martha. Not commonly found. Healthy and vigorous, and all those other things too.
THEY stayed until closing. Cliff stood aside to let Martha get on the bus. When she sat down, rugged up in her coat, he sat next to her. The seat was narrow, with a restraining bar at his thigh, so he had to sit close and squeeze Martha against the window. She sat with her hands crossed through the handles of her handbag. For once she had left her big bags at home.
Cliff felt like a king. He had insisted they stay for the fireworks, and Martha had loved them. She had clapped her hands in pleasure at each new explosion of color. Martha had nice hands. Not like Sandra. When he shook hands with Sandra, it was like shaking hands with a doll. Her fingers were little and white, like icicles. Martha’s fingers were thick and strong and warm, and the backs had only just started to freckle. It would be nice to hold one of those good hands, one of the hands that had helped him that day he fell in the street. He saw that Martha’s watch was crooked and poked below her sleeve. He could just take hold of that hand and turn her wrist to see the time, then pull her hand down into the warmth between their bodies and hold it there all the way home. She was thinking about something else, though. She appeared to be quite distracted
“What’s the time, Mattie?” he asked, taking her wrist and tilting the watch face so he could see it. He couldn’t read it; the light was poor, and numbers seemed to be smaller these days. He kept holding her hand, but she pulled it away.
“You don’t want a girlfriend, Cliff,” she said. “You want a mother.”
“No, I don’t,” he said. “A mother wouldn’t keep me warm at night.”
“If that’s what you want, I’ll make you some bed socks. I’ll get right on it. Look, I only ever had one good boyfriend, and I married him. One’s enough. The first one was such a good fit I don’t want another.”
Bugger, thought Cliff. Gambled and lost. But maybe it was just as well. If Martha had responded differently, he might have found he wasn’t up to it. Some things just didn’t work as well as they used to.
SANDRA, needing a haircut before she went to the conference, rang the salon in the big department store across from the university. They could fit her in with Perron during her lunch break. Perron. What kind of a name was that? She remembered a Perron from when she was in Year 10. When they were working on papier mâché puppets, he had jerked his finger in and out of the gluey puppet head to make sucking noises. Her last haircut had been a disaster, the final in a series of not very good cuts. Until now she had not had the energy to change. She needed someone new, so she asked the office staff at work. In her department there was an unspoken understanding that personal matters—home and family, partners, aging parents—were not discussed.
Perron was pushing forty, dark roots showing in bleached hair, and an odd touch of pink over one ear. He had the beginnings of a potbelly; his clothes were all black with sleeves half-mast on hairy golden arms. He walked around the salon like a cockerel in charge of hens.
Sandra flicked through the magazines as she waited for him. They were full of clothes and hair, no writing except for one-line captions for the images or slabs of advertising inadequately disguised as articles.
Perron came for her. Charming. She mutely followed him to the mirror and sat down. Close up he looked older than she had first thought. He returned her gaze in the mirror, looking into her eyes. He ran his hands around the line of her hair.
“What would you like?”
“Something smarter. I’ve just sacked the old hairdresser for incompetence.” She grimaced. “So see what you can do. Open slather.”
He pulled at the tufts of hair behind her ears. “Do you still want this to show at the front?”
“I don’t care, whatever you think best. I believe in giving a new hairdresser a fair go.”
“Come over here to the basin.”
Sandra was surprised. She had expected that someone lower in the pecking order would do the wash. He threw the black cape around her, gave her an anonymous body, tipped her head back to the basin. He took his time getting the water hot. When it came it was just right, coursing hard and strong against her scalp.
He had good hands, firm in the lathering. They discussed their work briefly.
He had been an oyster shucker and a waiter, silver service. But he wasn’t a talker, not a yabberer like the last insufferable woman. This was a relief to Sandra, who preferred silence.
“Do you want a treatment?” asked Perron.
“No thanks.”
The conditioner, smooth and silky. Perron’s thigh pushed against her shoulder, his hands pushing and pulling at her scalp, around the crown, behind the temples and ears, the nape of her neck, where she stored tension. Head massage, standard treatment, but he was good, very good. She wanted to close her eyes and relax, but that was too submissive somehow, an admission of intimacy she didn’t want. Was it a turn-on for him, rubbing women’s heads? Or was it a power trip, watching them relax under his hands? She didn’t know whether to close her eyes or leave them open. She settled for half closed.
Why was she always alert, on guard?
His leg against her shoulder was—what? Comforting? Stimulating? Bloody hell, Sandra, she said to herself, shut up and just enjoy it.
But she knew what it was: skin hunger. She wanted touch—craved touch, skin on skin, smoothing and easing. Not sex. She wanted massage without mess, without the work and the implications, to resolve the terrible tightness in her back and buttocks. Her right leg had been giving her trouble, the muscles around the hip needed stretching. The physical therapist had suggested massage or rolling on a tennis ball. The tennis ball was hopeless. She was getting old, her body was betraying her.
It would be good to lie in the sun and soak in warmth. It had been a long winter.
Perron was cutting now, snippety snip, careful, not too much at the beginning.
She hadn’t put on her makeup properly. Her forehead was white under the hair, and now more of it showed. In this light the gray hair didn’t look too bad.
Perron rubbed three different products into her hair. He didn’t ask permission. She didn’t protest.
On one side her hair grew thicker. He saw it and took to it with thinning scissors. He took time with the blowing and settling, then twisted the hand mirror behind her so she could see the back.
“Good. Thanks.” She was very pleased with it but wouldn’t flatter him. “I’ll give it a couple of days. You can never tell first up.”
“It’s a good cut,” he said. “And you’ve got good hair. Strong, and plenty of it.” She signed the Visa slip without checking the amount.
Back at work the office staff complimented her. None of the teaching staff appeared to notice.
ON PENSION day Cliff walked to the newsagent, counting his steps on the way. Three thousand and forty-two. If it was more than four thousand steps to the newsagent and if he put his left foot into the shop first, he would buy a five-dollar scratchy instead of a two-dollar one. No, no, if he saw three wattlebirds before he got to the end of the street, he would get a five-dollar scratchy. It was nearly the end of the street. Make that one wattlebird. No, that was no good. If he saw a red car between here and the newsagent, then he would get one, no cheating.
No red cars. Where were they all? What the heck. He’d get a five-dollar one anyway. Call it a treat for the beginning of spring.
Nothing. Another dud. His luck had better change soon, or he’d go bananas.
MARTHA lugged the vacuum cleaner into the church, where the sunlight was washing through the stained glass windows with the memorial plaques underneath saying who had died in the war. It was so long ago, and people were always dying in wars. Why should you be reminded of people dying when a church was supposed to be about resurrection? Not that you could have one without the other.
Martha pulled the heavy vacuum cleaner across the red carpet to the right-hand aisle, going carefully over the bumpy cord where the extra sound loop went for the deaf people to hear the preacher man standing at the front. Woman, Martha corrected herself. It had been a woman last week.
She liked the church when it was full of people, but she liked even better to have it all to herself on the day she did the cleaning. At this time of day, with the sun shining as it was now, it was light and warm. The front pew was right in the sun, and Martha sat down in the middle of it. Cliff had shown her a verse in the Bible that said walk in the light, so you might as well sit in it too if you had the chance. In fact, you could lie in it. Martha twisted around and shifted her legs up on the pew and lay, gingerly at first, going slowly into full stretch; she wasn’t sure she could keep her balance because the pew wasn’t wide, but after a while she began to relax. It was surprisingly comfortable. She put her hands behind her head and looked up. The ceiling needed painting. Cliff would want to have a go at it, but she doubted if Harry would let him. Harry was the maintenance man and ladder climber, and the ceiling was very high.
This is what it would be like lying in this church in your coffin. Coffins were usually parked a little farther to the front, but not much. A coffin was just like this: a narrow wooden bed, but with higher sides and satin sheets. Only in a coffin you wouldn’t have your hands behind your head, you’d have them straight down, soldierlike at your sides. Maybe that’s why they had those soldier plaques, to remind you that you would soon be dead and that you needed to walk and sit and lie in the light while you had the chance.
Knitting Page 6