by Helen Garner
‘You’ll never go to heaven,’ said Kathleen. ‘You’re rude.’
‘Don’t be a dill. Sit down here and tell me what you’ve been doing. The only way I can get away from the kids long enough to have a good talk with someone is by having another one.’
‘Oh . . . I muck round. Read, you know. Clean up.’
‘Charlie says Frank was down. You’re not getting together again, are you?’
‘Hardly. Too late for that, even if we wanted to.’
‘What a shame. I always liked Frank.’
‘So did I. Still do. I think he’s the ant’s pants. What’ve you been up to, apart from having babies?’
‘Praying.’ At Kathleen’s polite attempt to conceal her disgust, Pin burst out laughing. ‘I have – but I only said it to provoke.’
‘How was the birth?’
‘Oh, lovely. I mean – it would have been, if they’d left me alone. I was managing quite well, being a bit of an old hand, but I was probably making a lot of noise, because one of the doctors came in and mumbled something to the nurse, and next thing I know she’s approaching with a big cheesy smile and one hand behind her back. Righto, Mrs Hassett! she says. I want you to curl up on the table with your bottom right out on the edge, just like a little bunny rabbit. No you don’t! I said. No one’s giving me a spinal – I was a nurse before I got like this. I know that bunny rabbit line – just get away from me, thanks very much. And I battled on, and voila!’ She indicated with a flourish the sausage-shaped bundle in the cot beside the bed. ‘Anyway, Kath – ’scuse me for a sec. I’m going to stagger to the toilet.’
When Pin came back she was as white as a sheet.
‘Is anything wrong?’
‘I’m not sure. Here, help me back into bed, will you? I think I’d better call the doctor.’
‘What, Pin?’
‘I was wiping myself just now, and I felt something hard, right down in my vagina. I put my head between my knees and had a look. I think it’s my cervix.’
They stared at each other. Pin tried to laugh. ‘It’s probably nothing.’
A nurse came. She slipped her hand under the bedclothes. Kathleen wandered over to the window and looked out over the grey bay with its stumpy palm trees and, further away towards Melbourne on the endless volcanic plain, the two dead mountains, rounded as worn-down molars.
The nurse said, ‘I’ll go and call doctor.’ Her expression was respectful as she padded away on her soft white shoes. Pin grimaced and shrugged.
‘Oh Pin. What a drag.’ Kathleen sat down on the bed and took hold of her sister’s hand with its heavy silver engagement and wedding rings. ‘Are you still playing the piano?’
‘Yes, and I’m getting better too.’ Pin grinned defiantly. ‘My teacher said, “For a thirty-five-year-old with a rotten memory, you’re not doing too badly.”’
Across her mouth flitted a stoicism, a setting of the lips, still well this side of martyrdom.
*
The house was at the bottom of a dead-end road with narrow yellowing nature strips, and a railway line running across its very end like stitches closing a bag. It was twelve o’clock and there was no one around.
Jenny came out the front door and saw Kathleen dawdling by her car, arm along brow against the strong sun. She looked small, dwarfed by the big blue day, and unusually hesitant, leaning there looking this way and that, squinting up her face so that her top teeth showed. Jenny felt a throb of almost sexual tenderness towards her: a hard spasm of the heart, a weakening in the pelvis. She darted out the gate and stopped in front of Kathleen, seized her wrist. With force of will she kept the other woman’s hand, studied with a peculiar flux of love her sun-wrinkled eyes, the marks of her shrewd expressions. They could even smell each other: flower, oil, coffee, soap: and under these, warmed flesh, dotted tongue, glass of eye, glossy membrane, rope of hair, nail roughly clipped.
‘Welcome,’ said Jenny.
Perhaps they would never dare again. They stepped out of each other, frightened.
‘There’s nothing here to drink,’ called out Frank on the verandah. ‘I’m going to find a pub.’
Jenny turned away from Kathleen, distracted. ‘I’ll come with you.’
Kathleen waited, still leaning against her car, until they were out of sight, walking slowly in the heat with their arms round each other. Two ragged nectarine trees fidgeted their leaves in the scarcely-moving air. Her head was faint in the dryness. She heaved herself up and turned to tackle the house.
Its facade, a triangle on top of a square, was slightly awry and painted the aqua colour favoured by Greek landlords. She ducked under an orange and green blind rolled up on rotted ropes at the outer edge of the verandah, and turned the key in the handle-less front door.
In the tilting hallway she walked quickly past two or three small rooms with brown blinds half-drawn and opened the door into the kitchen, in which a combustion stove, painted white to indicate its decorative status, crouched in the chimney place, superseded by a gas cooker, itself forty years old, standing in a nearby corner alcove. Someone had slung a blanket across the window on two nails to keep the hot day out: its woollen folds muffled all movement of air and absorbed the knock of her footsteps.
She stood still in the bare centre of the room, on boards, in dimness. The heat was breathless. A drop of water bulged and quivered under the tap.
The back door was shut. It was made of four vertical strips of timber, also painted white, and closed with a loose brass knob. The timber had worn thin top and bottom, like the business end of front teeth, so that the dry brightness off the concrete outside was felt in the room as two insistent, serrated presences of light.
She opened the door, stepped down into the dazzling yard, and walked along by the grey wooden fence and through the green, dried-out trellis door into the wash-house with its squat copper and pair of troughs under the window never meant to open. She placed her palms lightly on the edge of the troughs. They were grey, forever damp and cool, clotted of surface and rimmed lead-smooth in paler grey; she had been bathed when very small in troughs such as these, and her mother had let her play with the wooden stick that she used to stir the copper, a stick with a face on the knob. The washhouse smelled of wet cloth and blue bags, and she could not climb out of the high trough by herself, so she was obliged to sit there nipple-deep in cooling water waiting for her mother, gazing blankly out the blurred window panes to the corner next to the dunny where the tank stood on its wooden stand, up to its ankles in grass even in summer, and if you tapped its wavy sides it would not give out a note for it was full to a level higher than you could reach, and its water was clear and swirly with wrigglers, baby mosquitoes that would not hurt you if you guzzled fast enough, and she sang out, ‘Mu – um! I’ve fi – nished!’ but her mother did not hear, for she was outside in the yard at the clothes line putting a shirt to her mouth to see if it was dry enough to be unpegged and taken in for ironing.
A bike clattered against the front fence.
‘Kath – leen!’ shouted Flo.
Kathleen slipped out of the wash-house and halfway down the yard came upon a rotary clothes-line rusting away on an angle, a skivvy faded to sand-colour hanging by one wrist from its lowest quadrant, like a flag left tattered and forgotten after a rout. She took hold of the body of the shirt and, without thinking, raised it to her lips in that gesture of mothers, breathed in its sweet dry weathered cotton soapy perfume; and at that moment saw a to-and-fro movement behind the wash-house window panes. It was Flo waving to her.
She dropped the skivvy and plunged on towards the back fence, beyond which dizzy cicadas raved endlessly in trees bordering the railway line. The faint voices of Flo and Frank, a little duet for piccolo and banjo, were still behind her in the back of the house. She stood at the end of the yard, almost off the property. A door banged somewhere else, water ran loudly into a metal container, fat hissed in another kitchen. The sky, without impurity, went up for miles.
It was
the house of her childhood. She knew its impermanent, camp-like feeling. When front and back doors were open, the house would be no more than a tunnel of moving air. Under rain, its roof would thunder and its down pipes rustle as you turned in your sleep. Heat in winter would have to be generated inside and cunningly trapped, in summer repulsed by crafty arrangements, early in the morning, of curtains and blinds. Unlike stone or brick, its weather board walls would not absorb the essence of its inhabitants’ existence: they were as insubstantial as Japanese screens: disappointment and anxiety, hope and contentment would pass through them with equal ease and rapidity. The house laid no claim to beauty. It was humble, and would mind its own business.
The last piece of furniture to be persuaded through the narrow front door was an oval table missing all four castors. They worried it into the kitchen, pulled up chairs and sat around it.
‘Didn’t this used to be our dining-room table back at Sutherland Street, Frank?’ said Kathleen.
‘Yep. Four dollars at the Anchorage, remember? That was when I cornered the market in cane chairs, too.’
‘Come off it! We only had three.’
‘Yes, but the price had doubled by the following Saturday.’
The fridge was already whirring behind the door. Jenny passed out cans of beer and sat down next to Frank. He smiled at her, but Kathleen’s opening line had launched him on a tide of domestic memory and he was away.
The impromptu performances that Frank and Kathleen put on at kitchen tables and other public places were the crudest manifestation of the force-field that hummed between them: an infinity of tiny signals – warning, comfort, rebuke – flashed from one to the other ceaselessly and for the most part unconsciously. In its most highly coded form it passed unobserved in a general conversation; in public garb it called others to witness, embraced them as audience or participants in embroidered tales of a common past. It was hatred, regret, pity; it was respect and the fiercest loyalty. They could no more have turned it off than turned back time.
Jenny was left striving for grace, for a courteous arrangement of features while they recited, delighted in the ring of names without meaning for her. Frank put his arm round her bare shoulders, but she kept looking at her beer can and fiddling it round and round, letting her curly hair fall across her face to shield her. There was a short silence in the room, during which Flo could be heard splattering the hose against the side wall of the house. They had opened the door and taken down the blanket as the afternoon drew on and the sun shifted off the concrete outside the kitchen, but the heat was still intense.
‘Give the concrete out here a bit of a sprinkle, love,’ Frank shouted. Flo did not answer, but a great silvery rope of water flew past the open door and whacked against the bedroom window.
‘Down a bit! Down! Don’t wet all our stuff!’
The dog, saturated and hysterical, darted into the kitchen and ran about in a frenzy. At the same instant they heard the first signs of life from next door, a rat-tattat of voices in a language they did not understand.
‘Is that Greek?’ said Jenny.
‘Might be.’ Frank was absent-mindedly stroking her neck. His dreamy smile sharpened into a cackle of laughter. ‘Hey Kath – remember Joe and Slavica?’
‘Oh God.’ She turned to Jenny. ‘They were a Yugoslavian couple who lived next door to us when we were first married.’
‘We got on fine with them for a while. They used to ask us in for dinner and force us to drink till we were falling off the chairs. We’d sing all night, it was great.’
‘Yes, but poor Slavica,’ said Kathleen. ‘She didn’t even score a place at the table. We’d arrive and there’d be three places set. Slavica would be out in the kitchen like a servant.’
‘You mean – she actually ate out there?’
‘Standing up. We used to have to drag her in and make her sit down.’
The two women exchanged their first straight look of solidarity. Frank galloped onwards, heading for the drama of it.
‘Anyway, Joe got crazier. He used to come home from work with half a dozen bottles and drink the lot all by himself in front of the TV.’
‘About ten o’clock one night we heard him start to curse and smash things –’
‘Their little boy nicked over our back fence to hide.’
‘He couldn’t speak English. He let me cuddle him.’
‘And then we heard the back door crash, and Slavica was locked out in the yard. She called out to us very softly, and we passed the kid back over the fence.’
‘He didn’t want to go back.’
‘And straight away we heard Joe rush out into the yard and abuse her –’
‘He thumped her!’
‘And he dragged the kid inside and left her in the yard all night, she told us later. She slept in a corner near the chook pen.’
‘Didn’t you do anything?’ said Jenny, horrified.
‘We were scared of him, too!’ said Frank. ‘He was big! He was a maniac! We rang the police, but they didn’t want to know about it – a domestic.’
Frank was on his feet now, his narrow eyes alight with story-teller’s fervour. ‘But one night Kath was driving home and she caught this ghostly figure in the headlights. It was Slavica running across the road with no shoes on. He’d kicked her out in the street. So Kath brought her into our place and she slept on the couch.’ He made two stabbing motions with his fore-finger towards the living room. ‘That couch in there, the white one. She said he was crazy because he suspected her of having an affair with the lodger. How corny can you get?’
‘The lodger was a classic. A real lounge lizard. He gambled all his money away and couldn’t pay the rent. He had a pencil moustache, slicked back hair, the lot.’
‘Well, next morning we waited till Joe went to work and then sneaked out to see if the coast was clear. It was raining, and there were all the lodger’s pathetic belongings chucked out on the footpath – a tattered suitcase, a pair of pointy two-tone shoes, a couple of lairy shirts –’
‘Slavica dashed in and got the kid,’ said Kathleen. ‘I took them down to the People’s Palace.’
‘The Salvation Army?’
‘We didn’t know where to take them, and it wasn’t safe at our place.’
‘But wasn’t there a Halfway House or something?’
‘Not back then!’ said Kathleen. ‘This is Australia, mate!’
‘Oh.’
Frank was poised to continue, bouncing on the balls of his feet. ‘Anyway, Kath found her a room in a house in Northcote run by an older Yugoslavian who said she’d been through the same story, and on Saturday morning Kath drove Slavica home to pick up some kitchen things.’
‘I pulled up out the front in this old VW we had at the time, and Slavica ran in and came out with an armful of pots and pans. She was too scared to go back for her clothes. Joe was on the front verandah with this terrible smile on his face, his arms were folded and he’d laugh – God it was awful, a sort of mad, bitter cackle – I said, Get in, Slavica, we have to get out of here. She jumps in, I’m trying to start the flaming car, the kid in the back with eyes as big as mill-wheels – and at the last minute Joe comes tearing out with a long piece of string and a saucepan, and ties it on the back bumper bar, like people do at weddings.’
‘My God.’
‘I get the car into gear, he’s raving and shrieking and half the street’s hanging over their front gates watching – and just as we take off he gives the back of the car an almighty kick, and away we go with the saucepan rattling behind us. Talk about an undignified retreat! I stopped about four blocks away and tore it off.’
Kathleen, out of breath, laughed nervously and glanced at Frank, who took up the tale. ‘Well, so Slavica was OK, but from then on we got no rest at night. He’d drink himself off the map after work, then at ten o’clock he’d start this awful yelling.’
‘Not yelling, exactly.’ said Kathleen. ‘Worse. More like loud whispering. Right under our bedroom window, whic
h fortunately was on the first floor.’
‘What did he say?’
She mimicked it slowly and dreadfully. ‘“Australian – bitch – cunt. I make you trouble. I burn. I kill.” And so on.’
There was a silence.
‘Was I born then, Kath?’ said Flo from the door. She was holding the dripping hose in her hand, and the dirt round her mouth made her look as if she were grinning.
‘You were born all right,’ said Kathleen. ‘You slept in a basket, and we were so scared of him that we kept you in our room all night, just in case. Point the hose the other way.’
‘In fact,’ said Frank, ‘we were so scared of him that I started drinking too.’
‘Is that why you started?’ said Jenny dryly.
‘I kept a sort of wooden club thing on the shelf above the front door.’
‘And you used to prowl around the house brandishing it and saying –’
‘“He’s strong, but I’m clever!”’The ex-couple chorused it and burst into a roar of laughter.
‘Why doesn’t Jenny tell a story now?’ said Flo, carefully directing the dribbling hose down her leg and off her ankle on to the concrete.
Faces relaxed, a softer laugh ran round the table, Jenny let her shoulder lean against Frank’s and turned up her face towards Kathleen. They were, after all, people of good will.
Soon Frank and Flo wandered outside to inspect the site of the vegetable garden and the two women sat shyly at the table, touching the same boards with their bare soles, the same table-top with their forearms, but clumsy, a thousand miles from the moment of blessing which had united them that morning.
Jenny spoke. ‘I was –’
‘Frank’s mother gave us those willow pattern plates,’ gabbled Kathleen, without hearing her. ‘You haven’t met Shirley, have you? I’m glad you’ve got my old kitchen cupboard. It used to belong to my best friend when she was married. And those knives, see where they’re engraved JF? Those are my grandfather’s initials.’
Jenny, sick of it and too polite, fell back. What hope was there? Tongues were wagging stumps before such entanglement, such opaqueness of desire.