by Helen Garner
Out the back, in the long sun of late afternoon, Frank and Flo saw a bird hop extravagantly off the concrete, with a worm in its beak. They laughed, and with one accord folded their arms wing-like behind their backs and mimicked its irresistible self-satisfaction.
Flo in baby’s bonnet and mosquito bites; Frank bearded like a Russian and wearing a sheepskin coat; Kathleen looking embarrassingly plain, her hair pulled back harshly off her forehead, her mouth drooping illtemperedly; Frank chest-deep in a swimming pool with Flo perched on his shoulder; Kathleen squinting suspiciously, walking away from the camera with a huffy turn of the shoulder, standing awkwardly against bare asphalt in a silly mini-skirt. Then Frank and Kathleen grinning carelessly, open-faced and confident, audacious almost, shoulder to shoulder as if nothing would ever trouble the effortless significance of their being a couple.
Jenny shuffled the photos back into their box and knelt there among the cartons. Which was worse? Her utter non-existence at that moment when they had been happy, or her twinge of pleasure at Kathleen’s plainness? She was disgusted with herself. She slid out the painful photo again and indulged the pang, like a child shoving its tongue against a loose tooth. She turned the photo over and read Perth February 1970 in a round slanting hand. In February 1970 she had had no meaning to them, neither flesh nor spirit, no voice, no form. She was nebulous. She wrestled with her anonymity, tried to force herself into premature, retrospective existence. Serenely there on the glossy sheet they laughed up at her, brown-faced. Their being flowed oblivious beyond her. It was as outrageous to her spirit as if she had tried to imagine life continuing after her own death.
‘Snoopers never find out anything nice,’ said Frank behind her.
She jumped and shoved the picture away as if it had burned her.
‘I used to snoop on Kath’s diary, years ago,’ he said. ‘Know what the worst thing about it was? I never even got a mention.’ He laughed out loud, cheerfully. ‘Look. I brought you something.’
He held out his closed hand to her. Inside it something whirred loudly. She shrank back, dreading a prank, but he shook his head and kept proffering it to her.
‘No. Look. It’s a cicada.’
‘Will it bite?’
‘No. They sing!’
He opened his hand cautiously and took hold of the insect with thumb and forefinger. It goggled at her.
‘La cigale et la fourmi! Par Jean de la Fontaine!’ chanted Frank.
He was charming her, and she laughed. ‘Let it go, Frankie. It might have a tiny heart attack.’
Lost in a dreamy curiosity, Frank wandered off down the hall to the back door, holding the dry creature up to his face and murmuring to it. He said out loud, ‘Take this message to the Queen of the Cicadas!’ and opened his hand: away it soared into the blue evening. He had forgotten Jenny, imagining that she had gone back to her unpacking, but when he turned he saw that she had followed him softly into the kitchen and was watching him. He laughed uncertainly, caught out in his game, afraid of being thought foolish. He stood poised in the doorway waiting for judgement. She did not know if she could speak.
‘I love you,’ she whispered.
‘Do you?’ The light was behind him and she could not see his face. ‘I hope so. I want you to.’
At the moment where day passed into night, the house and yard were still.
‘You remind me of a lizard,’ she said, blushing. ‘You remind me of a lizard on a tree trunk.’
He laughed. ‘Pommy. I bet you’ve never even seen a lizard, let alone one on a tree trunk.’
‘I have so. I saw it on television.’
‘Come here,’ he said.
They sat on the step and she put her head on his knee.
‘Let me smell your neck,’ he said. ‘Mmmm. Sweet as a nut. A nut-brown maiden.’
‘Do you think we should make a meal?’
‘Sooner or later. Hey. Kath and I were a bit hard to take today, weren’t we. Talking about old times.’
‘It was worse when you were outside and she formally surrendered the crockery and furniture to me. She reminded me of the mother of a bloke I used to live with in England. “Jen – nee! You do know how to defrost a fridge, don’t you?” She was the closest I ever came to having a real Jewish mother-in-law. She was so generous I kept thinking, “Look out – there’s something else going on here.”’
They laughed.
‘Well,’ said Jenny, ‘maybe I’ll be able to talk with Kath one day, just the two of us.’
‘What for? You’ll find out what’s wrong with me soon enough.’
‘No. Not for that.’ She sat up and pushed her back into his shoulder. There was still a faint slick of sweat between their skins. ‘It’s risky, isn’t it, what we’re doing.’
‘Yes. Very.’
‘And not very fashionable, either.’
‘No. There are quite a few people around who wouldn’t mind seeing me slip on a banana peel.’
‘Not Kathleen.’
‘No. I mean the opinion-makers. The anti-marriage lobby. Of which I remain one of the founding members, as if anyone needed another contradiction.’ He let out his sharp, cackling laugh. ‘I’m game, if you are.’
She thought she was probably game. She twisted herself round to smile at him. Her teeth were white and good, with a gap between the front two.
‘Your teeth are like Terry Thomas’s,’ he said. ‘I saw him once, walking along Exhibition Street. He was wearing a loud check suit. And he said to me, “Hel – lo! Would you laike to go for a raide in mai spawts car?”’
‘He did not!’
‘Actually it was Kath who saw him, not me. Is there any beer left?’
They stepped up into the kitchen and began rummaging for food.
*
They were waiting for Frank.
Flo’s half of the children’s room was quite bare, once they had put things in piles and packed up her belongings to go. She had few clothes but dozens of books. The room echoed. They stood by the stripped bed, not sure what to do next.
‘Want to draw?’ said Flo.
They settled down at the table with the box of Derwents between them and coloured away companionably, discussing patterns and the condition of the pencils.
‘Gee I’ll miss you,’ said Kathleen. ‘I’ll miss that awful piercing voice going “Kath? Kath!”’
‘And I’ll miss you going “Psst – psst – hurry up!”’ said Flo.
They smiled at each other and got on with their work.
‘Kathleen,’ said Flo after a while. ‘Have I got perfect teeth?’
‘Who has.’
‘Some people do.’
‘Mmmm.’
‘Kath. Is there anything . . . sort of . . . special about me?’
‘Yes. You’ve got a wart on your elbow.’
‘No! Really.’
‘I don’t know, Floss. Lots of things, probably.’
‘Will you tell me the true answer, if I ask you a serious question?’
‘Sure.’
‘Am I adopted?’
‘Not exactly. I found you under a cabbage.’
Flo drummed her feet, trying not to laugh. ‘You said you’d be serious. Am I?’
‘No, sweetheart.’
‘How can I be sure?’
‘I’m sure, for God’s sake! I lugged you round inside me for nine months, and I had you in the Queen Victoria Hospital, with several witnesses present.’
‘Did I hurt, coming out?’
‘Yes . . . but it’s not like ordinary pain. You got a bit stuck, after trying to come out for about twenty-six hours. The doctor had to help you out with a thing called forceps, like big tweezers.’
‘Yow.’ Flo had heard this story at least fifteen times before, and never tired of it. ‘What did I look like? Was I cute?’
‘It was hard to tell. You were a bit bloody.’
‘Bloody?’
‘There was blood on you.’
‘How come?’
‘Inside the uterus there’s lots of spongy stuff partly made out of blood, which you lived in for nine months. And they had to make a little cut in the back of my cunt, to make it bigger and let you out.’
‘Poor Kath,’ said Flo luxuriously.
‘Oh no – that part didn’t hurt, because they gave me an injection. And then they cut the cord and washed you and wrapped you up in a cotton blanket and let me hold you.’
‘Aaaah,’ said Flo with her head on one side.
‘And then I cried with happiness.’
‘Aaaah.’ Flo dropped her pencil and came round the table. She backed up to Kathleen and sat on her knee. ‘I love that story. It’s my favourite story.’
‘I’m pretty keen on it too.’
‘Guess what – Jenny might be going to have a baby.’
‘What?’
‘Hey – I can hear a car.’ She sprang off her mother’s knee and went racing out into the hall. Very carefully, Kathleen began to slide the pencils back into their right places.
Kathleen stood outside the front gate with a forgotten jumper in her hands. In the oblong back window of the diminishing car she saw a brown blob become white: Flo turning to look back. A child would be born to which Frank would be father, Flo half-sister, and Kathleen nothing at all. With a sharp gesture she shoved her hands down the little knitted sleeves.
*
Jenny and Frank hardly slept, for days, in their house. He lay with his arm under her neck and round her chest so she was folded neatly with her back against his wiry flank, her right cheek resting on his upper arm.
‘Tell me, tell me,’ he said.
Stumbling at first, finding a pace, she talked to him about her childhood. He asked and asked for details: what sorts of trees? what did you look like? what was on the table? and while she talked he saw again, richly, his own small town, Drought Street, the oval behind the house, the white tank on its stand beside the school, the dusty road, the dry bare leafy dirt of the track home.
‘In our marsh there were snipe,’ she said.
‘We ate monkey nuts,’ he replied.
‘I sat under a tree, in a striped dress of silky material.’
‘A boy had his mouth washed out with soap for swearing.’
‘My father had the best garden in the village: people passing in buses admired it over the hedge.’
‘I ran a sharp pencil down the big river systems on a plastic template of Australia.’
‘My grandmother took me to London for tea. A long white curtain puffed in the wind on to our table: when it fell back there was jam and cream on it.’
‘On the first day of school it was so hot that the door of the general store was shut because of the north wind and the dust. I went to buy an exercise book off Mrs Skinner and I sat on the doorstep waiting.’
‘My father did his accounts at night, and light came through a hole in the wall up near the ceiling, into my room.’
‘On the track between the ti-tree the air ticked, and there was a smell like pepper.’
‘Were you happy?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘I don’t remember.’
Sleep, what was it? Sometimes Flo stirred or cried out. Someone next door was awake, a white night; they heard soft footsteps, a door closing quietly, a restless person moving. There were hours, it seemed, of lying perfectly still, wide awake, flooded into stillness by the melting of their skins. Secretly, each of them dreamed that Flo was their common child, that they were lying close to each other in some inexpressible dark intimacy of bodies and of history.
After dinner Jenny set herself up with her exercise books at the kitchen table. Flo edged in with a red tartan shirt in her hand.
‘Jenny. Is it you who mends my stuff now?’
‘Me or Frank. I expect. What is it?’
‘I ripped it on the equipment at school. I could ring up Kathleen,’ said Flo.
‘Um – no, don’t do that. Go and hop into bed. You can read till nine o’clock.’ How briskly should she speak? Her voice rang falsely in her ears.
‘Kath always lets me read till about ten o’clock. Five to ten,’ said Flo, speaking rapidly and keeping her eyes on the ground.
‘Flo.’
‘Well, she did! Sometimes!’ Flo turned up her face defiantly and went very red; her gaze sheered somewhere to the right of Jenny’s. Jenny blushed too.
‘Give me the shirt, Flo.’
Flo shoved it at her, darted into her room and sprang into bed. She began to read immediately so as not to think of her failed manoeuvre. Jenny was not sure whether she should go in and kiss her goodnight. She dropped the shirt on to the kitchen table and started twisting a handful of her hair, flicking the springy ends between her fingers and letting her eyes blur. Frank would never notice the tear in the shirt. She could do it quickly now without saying anything, thus adding a drop to the subterranean reservoir of resentment that all women bear towards the men they live with, particularly the ones they love; or she could point it out to him in a pleasant tone and they could discuss it like civilised people. Why did they always have to be bloody trained? She stuck a piece of hair in the corner of her mouth. She heard the front door slam, and sat down quickly at the table. He came in whistling with eyes bright from the street.
‘Frank. There’s a problem.’
‘What?’ He stopped.
‘There’s a tear in your daughter’s shirt.’ She pointed at the red garment on the table.
‘Oh!’ He picked it up by its collar. ‘Is it my job, then?’
‘I think so.’ She was solemn as a judge at the head of the table. ‘Also, I’ve got some other work to do.’
‘I can do buttons,’ he said doubtfully, ‘but I’ve never been too hot on actual tears.’
She said nothing, hooked her bare feet on the chair rung and fought the treacherous womanly urge. He darted her a quick sideways glance.
‘Well!’ he said with a rush of his determined cheerfulness. ‘I’ll see what sort of a fist I can make of it.’ He hurried out of the room and returned with an old tea-tin which disgorged a tangled mass of cotton, buttons, coins and drawing pins. Jenny turned back to her books and began to mark them, looking at him every now and then. Frank leaped to the task. He spread the patch over the rip, fidgeted it this way and that, clicked his tongue at his clumsy fingers.
‘There! Got the bugger covered. Now for the pins. Heh heh. Just a matter of applying my university education, in the final analysis.’
He looked up. Pen poised, she was gazing at him in that state of voluptuous contemplation with which we watch others at work. With joy he sank the needle into the cloth.
‘At the school I went to,’ said Jenny in a little while, ‘we had an hour of sewing every day. One person read out loud, and the others sewed. We even had to use thimbles.’
‘Sounds like Little Women,’ said Frank, negotiating a corner with his tongue between his teeth. He was sewing away quite competently now. ‘Didn’t kids muck around?’
‘No. It was very peaceful, actually. We all wanted to be nuns for that hour.’ She laughed.
‘I’m glad it was only an hour a day, then. Otherwise we might never have met. Well – aren’t you going to read to me?’
‘What shall I read?’
‘I’m not fussy.’ He was round the corner and on to the home stretch.
She opened a book at random and read, ‘Her Anxiety. Earth in beauty dressed / Awaits returning spring / All true love must die / Alter at the best / Into some lesser thing / Prove that I lie.’
Frank, paying no attention, was holding out the small garment to show her. He was as pleased as Punch.
*
In her room, for days, Kathleen found traces of Flo everywhere: half-filled exercise books, a slice of canteloupe skin with teeth marks along its edges, a skipping rope with wooden handles. She picked up her nightdress and Flo’s little flowery one dropped out of its folds.
She wandered out to the kitchen and sat at the tab
le cutting her fingernails. She sat sideways on her chair looking out the windows at the very clear air. A gum tree over the fence flashed its metallic leaf-backs in the wind. A bird flew across the yard in patchy sunshine, its wings gathered as it coasted on air; it disappeared behind the bamboo which was being jostled by the wind. Kathleen’s eyes filled with tears.
‘I feel unstable,’ she said. ‘Not bad – just –’ She made her flat hand roll like a boat. The other woman at the table looked up over her glasses and nodded, saying nothing.
She worked, throwing away page after page and plugging on, sharpening the pencil every five minutes. The floor around her was sprinkled with shavings. At three thirty she knew it was no good. For four years she had been programmed to stop thinking at school home-time, and will was powerless against this habit. She got under the eiderdown with the most boring book she could find and tried to read herself into a doze so she could get through the moment when Flo would not push open the door and stand there grinning with her school-bag askew upon her back. In a little while she got up and sat at the table again and kept forcing.
She went for a walk up to the top of the street to the old people’s settlement. There were yellow leaves everywhere. She leaned against a gate-post, dull, feeling nothing in particular. An old woman came out her back door to empty a rubbish bin and saw her standing there.
‘Hullo dear,’ she called. She had a silver perm and knobbly black shoes and an apron which lifted a little
in the wind.
‘Hullo.’
The woman moved closer. ‘Anything wrong?’
‘Not really. I’m missing my little girl.’
‘Oh.’ The old woman knew what she was talking about. Kathleen wanted to ask her the imponderables: what do you understand that I don’t? Does it get easier or harder? If she had dared she would have asked something simpler: will you invite me into your kitchen and let me watch you make a cup of tea?
‘Do you do any gardening, dear?’
‘No.’
‘I’ve found that a great help,’ said the old lady. ‘My gardens have got me through two nervous breakdowns.’
The old woman was small and wrinkled, and her large ear-lobes had become floppy with the weight of the gold rings that hung from them. Her skin looked waxy, and on her cheek-bones were several enormous blackheads. Her dark blue crêpe dress, unlike Kathleen’s, had probably been owned by the same person ever since it was bought. She was not looking at Kathleen, perhaps so as to spare her from social duty, but simply stood beside her, following her gaze to the turbulence of coloured clouds behind the trees in their fullness, the upper sky veiled with pale grey, the parsley trembling in thin rows, the worn-out tea towels showing their warp and woof on the line. In a little while she heaved a sigh, and gave Kathleen a quick look from her bright eyes. ‘Well. Back to work, I s’pose. It’ll be teatime d’rectly. Ta ta!’