Honour & Other People's Children

by Helen Garner

  ‘I wouldn’t be so bloody sure. They’re drug-happy, those blokes – eh, Kath?’

  She nodded, watching.

  ‘I was just going to wake her up and give her something to eat, when you two arrived,’ said Jack. ‘I had a snack a little while ago.’ On the sink were a plate, a knife and a fork, rinsed.

  ‘I’ll do it, Dad,’ said Frank. ‘You sit down there and take a break. What’ll we give her, Kath?’

  They cobbled together a dish of yoghurt and fruit, and Frank took it into the bedroom. Jack, legs crossed in his favourite corner chair, deer stalker cap pulled down over his bristly eyebrows and transistor whining faintly on his lap, began a soft tuneless whistle, tapping his fingertips on the armrests and looking out the window with elaborate casualness.

  ‘Tum te tum te tum. Well . . .’ he murmured. He sneaked a look at Kathleen and returned to his contemplation of a bush outside the glass.

  ‘Think I’ll pop out the back for a sec and have a look at the garden before it gets too dark,’ said Kathleen at last, to put him out of his misery.

  ‘Mmmm . . . there’s quite a show out there. Pick some to take home.’ One foot in its gleaming brogue beat rhythmically on air.

  She made her escape and stood in mild air on the sloping lawn. A wind moved in the garden, very gentle and sweet: it shifted pleasantly among the leaves of small gums and roses past their season. The sky blurred upward, pearly as the inside of a shell, and in this delicate firmament there floated a perfect moon, its valleys and mountains lightly etched.

  Shirley’s voice rose sharply from the bedroom, and Frank’s answered. Their words were indistinct. Then footsteps thumped, and Frank burst out the back door and stood staring desperately into the massed hydrangeas. Kathleen stepped up beside him.

  ‘I had to feed her with a spoon,’ he said, grinding his teeth and sniffing. ‘She didn’t want me to. She only wants Dad.’

  ‘She’s probably ashamed.’

  ‘What? What of?’

  ‘Being weak in front of you. And she’s probably worried about being ugly.’

  ‘Ugly! I don’t give a damn about that! I just want to know what drugs those bastards have got her on. I’ve never seen her as dopey as this!’ He clenched his fists and let out a sob. Kathleen slipped one arm round his waist and tried to hug him unobtrusively. He was rigid and very thin.

  ‘Does she know I’m here?’

  ‘Yes. Go and say hullo. I think she might want a drink. I’ll stay out here and calm down.’

  The old woman struggled to sit up. ‘No, don’t kiss me,’ she said in distress, moving her head from side to side as Kathleen approached. ‘I’m all –’ She pulled her night-dress together at the neck to hide the scaly patches of skin on her chest. Jack smiled vaguely and felt his way along the wardrobe and out of the room.

  ‘I’ve brought you a drink, Shirl.’ Kathleen was all solidity and hearty tone, sticking her hand out with the fizzing glass in it. After two sips of dry ginger, great runs of air rumbled up from Shirley’s stomach, and she turned her face away, blushing feebly and covering her mouth with her hand.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

  ‘Makes you burp, does it,’ said Kathleen. ‘That’s what fizzy drinks are for.’

  ‘I hate it,’ cried Shirley passionately, still with her shoulder turned.

  ‘Do you? I love it,’ said Kathleen without a shadow of a lie but full of motive. ‘It’s good for you.’

  The bedclothes were all skew-whiff, the sheets out of alignment with the blankets, the whole lot dragging on the floor.

  ‘Will I tidy up a bit for you, Shirl?’

  ‘Oh, it’s too much trouble, love.’ She fretted among the pillows, turning her head in abrupt movements like a bird.

  ‘No it’s not. I’ll call Frank.’

  Frank settled his mother on a chair while Kathleen took hold of the bedclothes and yanked them away. A shower of silvery dead skin flakes flew out and fell in drifts on the polished wood floor.

  ‘It’s awful,’ moaned Shirley, humiliated in her dressing-gown.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Mum,’ said Frank. ‘It’s not awful, and you must accept being looked after.’

  Kathleen worked away efficiently with clean linen, shoving her hands between mattress and base and plumping up pillows. She remembered sitting thinly on a chair with her feet dangling while her mother ‘made her bed nice’.

  ‘There you are. Hop in here. I’ll run the old sheets through the machine.’ She gathered them up in her arms and forged out the door.

  Shirley’s splintery voice trailed after her. ‘The second cycle, lovey – don’t forget to open both the taps, and not too much soap powder . . .’

  ‘She knows how to do it, Mum,’ snapped Frank. Kathleen almost laughed. When Frank and his mother talked like that, things were getting back to normal. She blundered round in the laundry, unused to machines that worked without the introduction of coins, and got the thing going at last. She was standing there thinking in the cloth-muffled room when Frank slipped in and shut the door behind him.

  ‘What’s Jack up to?’ said Kathleen.

  ‘Fumbling round in the study trying to find Mum’s prescription.’

  Frank picked up a basket full of pegs and rattled it fiercely. ‘I think this is probably the beginning of the . . . race to the end.’ He grimaced, pointed one finger heavenwards and then down to the earth, and mimed sleep as children do, eyes closed and palms together under one cheek. They both laughed painfully.

  In Shirley’s kitchen the autumn sunlight was oblique and very bright. Kathleen squinted and moved constantly from one part of the room to another in search of an area of shade for her face. There was a blinding sheen on the table-boards, shafts of light sprang from cutlery, Frank’s hair stood out like an aureole. The plastic cover of the photo album dazzled relentlessly.

  ‘Look,’ said Frank.

  ‘I can’t see.’

  ‘It’s my dog, a foxy I had when I was a kid.’

  Shuffling footsteps came along the passage, and Shirley stood in the doorway with a mustard-coloured shawl wrapped round her.

  ‘What are you doing out of bed, Mum?’

  ‘Oh . . . I’m all right,’ she insisted in her cracked voice, pushing past him and sitting down at the table. ‘I’d rather be up and about.’

  Frank clicked his tongue, but passed her the album. ‘Look, Mum. Remember when Auntie Hazel used to stay in her caravan in our back yard?’

  Shirley seized the album and shielded her eyes over it. ‘Oohoo, that Hazel,’ she crooned with a note of malice.

  ‘Look at that dress she’s got on! We said at the time, Brocade’s as dead as a dodo, we said. We all knew what she was after when she latched on to Keith. There was the house in Kyneton, all his mother’s things, you never saw such lace – and the furniture, a cheval glass she’d had made up for her by an old Chinaman up Ballarat way . . . Hazel hung on like grim death, but she only got hold of it a clock here, a chair there.’ She turned the pages with a sigh, and they sat listening, half-hypnotised as she murmured. ‘Ah, there’s Jack as a younger man. He had a finely turned ankle in those days. It was the first thing I noticed about him. Why should I tell you all this? Dear God, it’s life, I suppose.’

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you, Mum,’ said Frank suddenly. Kathleen looked up startled and saw him take the deep breath before the plunge.

  ‘What, love.’ Shirley hovered over the grey snaps like a map-reader.

  ‘Kath and I are getting a divorce.’

  The plastic page flopped loosely under her idle hand, as if she had not heard.

  ‘Now, we don’t want you to get upset about this, Mum,’ he said, his voice sharpening into the old warning note.

  ‘What, lovey?’ She turned the book sideways and bent over it the better to scrutinise.

  ‘I might be getting married again, Mum. I’m going to live with someone.’

  Shirley looked up from the picture book and spoke very
clearly, with a note of world-weariness that they had never heard before. ‘Oh, I don’t give a damn. She can come down here. That couch turns into a double bed. I only ever wanted you, Kath, and Flo, but it’s no use growling. I can’t be worried about it now. Bring her down.’

  Frank was shocked. Not only had he expected her to be outraged, but he needed her to be, so that he might define himself against her protest. It was perhaps the moment of his growing up. Before Kathleen’s eyes the knot dissolved, and she watched him float free, feet groping, full of alarm.

  Kathleen and Frank went walking down by the shore, under the avenues of huge cypresses rooted deep in the sandy ground. Perhaps they would have liked to walk arm in arm: there were historical reasons for the fact that they did not.

  ‘I love it here,’ said Frank. ‘It seems so old. I bet Yalta on the Black Sea must be like this – flat and mournful. When I read The Lady with the Dog I imagined it happening here.’

  On the pier their footsteps rang hollow and water slapped way below. Long ships, business-like, slid past on their way to the heads: some quality of absence in the air brought them unnaturally close. It was late afternoon, and a strange metal light intensified most vividly the dark greens and greys of the shore, and of the sad water that seemed to stream past them oceanwards. Frank, absorbed in his Chekhovian fantasy, planted himself squarely at the very end of the pier, slitting his eyes and loosening his coat to let it flap in the wind.

  ‘There’s going to be a storm,’ remarked Kathleen in a neutral tone, absent-mindedly brushing dandruff off his shoulders.

  ‘Have you no eyes, Kathleen?’ trumpeted Frank. He fronted the brisk wind with a histrionic gesture. ‘Look about you! Is there no poetry left in your soul?’

  ‘Oh, I think there might be a bit left,’ she said drily. She stared past him.

  The water was lashing at the encrusted supports of the pier, and the big lifeboat groaned on its pulleys. Their hair streamed back off their skulls and rain began to sprinkle sharply on to their up-turned faces.

  ‘Let’s go, Frankie.’

  ‘OK,’ he grumbled good-naturedly, ‘you old prune. I wish Floss was here. She’d play with me.’

  They turned up their collars and let the wind hurry them back towards the car. On the dashboard Frank had sticky-taped a type-written notice which read, This car should last another ten years. He drove with nervous efficiency. As he drove he sang, accompanying himself with sharp taps of the left foot:

  There’s a trade we all know well

  It’s bringing cattle over

  On every track to the Gulf and back

  Men know the Queensland drover

  and she joined in the chorus because she knew it would give him pleasure:

  Pass the billy round boys

  Don’t let the pintpot stand there

  For tonight we drink the health

  Of every Overlander

  Loudly and in harmony they sang, sneaking each other embarrassed, happy smiles, then laughed and avoided each other’s eyes.

  ‘I’m scared Dad’ll go before I can get his story out of him,’ said Frank.

  ‘Didn’t you start taping it?’

  ‘Yes. But it’s so hard to get him going. He’s shy, and he gets mixed up.’

  ‘Did you get the one about the carrot?’

  Frank knitted his brows and mimicked his father’s slow, musing voice: ‘I was sitting on the verandah after work when Reggie Blainey came down the road dragging over his shoulder what looked like a young sapling. He got closer and I saw it was actually the fronds of a giant carrot. I says, Well, Reggie, that’s the biggest carrot I’ve ever seen! And he looks up at me and he says, Listen, you reckon this is big? I dug for three hours – and the bloomin’ thing forked at twenty foot.’

  Under the rain, the lights of Geelong were coming on as they sped down the Leopold Hill.

  *

  Kathleen’s brother-in-law opened the door to them in a flustered moment. An invisible child was throwing a tantrum in the kitchen, and from the stereo in the living room a string quartet was straining away loudly.

  ‘Hul-lo!’ he cried in amazement. ‘What a treat! Come in! Pin was whizzed into hospital straight after lunch – the baby’s overdue. We’re just waiting for news.’

  They followed him into the kitchen, where the benches and tables were covered in bright blue formica and the small window looked out over fruit trees and a chook pen. At their appearance the child on the floor ceased to beat his fists and sat up to stare, his cheeks puce and tear-stained.

  ‘My goodness!’ said Charlie. ‘I haven’t seen you two together for – must be five years! There’s not a reconciliation, is there?’ He clapped his hand over his mouth as if he had made a gaffe. Kathleen and Frank, whose lack of interest in divorce had given them a certain bohemian status in both their families, remained collected. Kathleen swept a mass of blocks off a chair and sat down. The two men stood about, Charlie flipping a teatowel, Frank grinning at the floor. The older boy appeared in the doorway as the string quartet reached its climax and resolved itself into one drawn-out, quivering harmony. Silence. Charlie sighed voluptuously.

  ‘Wonderful, isn’t it,’ he said.

  ‘When’s mummy coming home. I want mummy to come home.’

  ‘Yes dar-ling,’ sang Charlie irrelevantly on two notes, his mind on something else but not soon enough, for a covered saucepan erupted on the stove and milk went everywhere. ‘Damn. Blast it.’

  Kathleen spoke up without forethought. ‘I could stay for a few days, if you like, and give you a hand with the kids.’

  ‘Oh, would you?’ He spun round with the inadequate wettex dripping on his shoes.

  ‘Am I neurotic?’ thought Kathleen, already aware of a trickle of regret behind the smile.

  She hurried the trolley along the bright shelves of the supermarket, Ben trotting at her side and Tom lording it in the seat above the merchandise. No matter how fast she moved, something horrible kept pace with her, ran smoothly along behind the ranged and perfect shining objects: something to do with memory, with time past she thought she had escaped, as long ago as childhood when she had striven to imagine her mother’s life and her own future: meals, meals, meals: the meal as duty, as short leash, as unit of time inexorable into everlastingness. She dared not glance at other women passing lest she see confirmation of it in their faces. There was no word for this sickness in her, running alongside her, but void.

  In the checkout queue she realised she had forgotten fruit.

  ‘Will you stay here and mind the shopping while I run back?’ Ben gripped her hand convulsively.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ she pleaded. ‘There’s nothing to worry about – we’ll go home and have some lunch.’

  She wrenched herself free and bolted along the slick alleyways, frantic to be by herself even for sixty seconds. She glanced back at them as she skidded round the great cabinets steaming with frost and saw Ben’s pale face eyeing her and Tom’s mouth opening to let out one of his leisurely roars. I can’t stand it, can’t stand it, a whining chipmunk voice began up in the back of her skull, it chattered at her, jibbered, she dived both hands into the pile of netted oranges, flipped them this way and that, mould whiffed at her, the skull beneath the skin pipped the voice, shit shit shit, two bags at sixty-five cents, she counted on her fingers a dollar thirty something, now where are those two little buggers? God help them, God send me back to Flo, how did I stand it when she was only two? Only three more days and I’ll be on that train.

  Outside, she trundled the pusher up the hill. It was quicker to carry Tom in it than to round him up on foot, but he was fat and the heavy shopping bags, one in each hand against the handle of the flimsy pusher, bumped clumsily against her legs and the wheels as she progressed. Ben gripped the handle, continually swinging the triple load out of line. She fought herself for patience. The sky was thick, big drops started, they had no coats. Tom began to bellow,

  ‘Wet! Wet! Wet! Wanna det out!’
>
  ‘Oh shut up Tom!’ she raged, wrenching hard to get the pusher wheel out of a crack in the pavement. Ben slid her a sly look.

  ‘Will I shove a jelly bean into him?’ he hissed.

  They began to laugh conspiratorially.

  ‘Where did you get ’em?’

  ‘While you were paying the lady.’

  The pathetic cavalcade struggled up the hill.

  She sat on the back verandah cutting slice after slice off a rubbery ginger cake she had found in a tin and stuffing it into her mouth. The boys played in their sandpit. The sand was dark yellow but the rain had stopped. She remembered reading somewhere: only if you have been a child in a certain town can you know its sadness, bone sadness, sadness of the blood. Every day the clouds come over. She went and stood by the sandpit. The little shovels made a damp grating sound as the children sank them into the sand.

  At teatime when Charlie came home from work, she served up for dessert a kind of pudding. Everyone but Tom ate it enthusiastically. Enthroned in his high chair, holding his spoon like a sceptre, he scowled into his bowl.

  ‘Eat up, Tom,’ said his father. He glanced at Kathleen and poked the pudding into a more attractive shape in the bowl. ‘It’s cake.’

  Tom withered him with a look. ‘That is not cake.’His aunt and his father lowered their lying heads on to the table among the plates and laughed in weak paroxysms.

  The baby came, a girl. Kathleen sniffed the head of the creature rolled tightly in its cotton blanket. Looking at her sister had always been like looking into a mirror: large forehead, eyes that drooped at the outer corners, pointed chin, small mouth. Kathleen laughed.

  ‘What’s funny?’ said Pin, shifting uncomfortably in the hospital bed.

  ‘I was looking at your mouth. It’s exactly the same as mine.’

  ‘Small and mean,’ said Pin, whose devotion to the church did not damp her vulgar sense of humour. ‘Wanna see a cat’s bum?’ She pursed her lips into a tight bunch. They snickered in the quiet ward.