by Helen Garner
‘I came because, because things are a bit much for me, right now. I’m a mess, in fact.’
‘You, a mess?’
‘Do I have to break plates?’
‘No. I shall try to see for myself.’
‘All this is very painful for me. I can’t get used to living without Flo.’
‘I thought Frank said you wanted to work.’
‘I do. But it’s so long now that I’ve had to make my life fit around her – it doesn’t make sense without her.’ She twisted her face, trying to make a joke. ‘I’m bored. I don’t get any laughs.’
‘I have the impression that you judge the whole tenor of your life by whether or not you’re laughing enough.’
‘You could say that.’
‘I don’t know if that’s a good criterion.’
‘Know any better ones?’
‘Why is it so important, laughing?’
‘Look. I’ve got this sign stuck on my bedroom wall. It’s by Cocteau. It says, What would become of me without laughter? It purges me of my disgust.’
‘What disgusts you?’
‘Oh, my whole life, sometimes. Things I’ve done. Things I haven’t done. My big mouth. My tone of voice. The gap between theory and practice. The fact that I can’t stand to read the paper.’
They looked down uncomfortably.
‘Sometimes the only person I can stand is Floss here. For years I’ve thought I’d be glad to see the back of her. Now I don’t know what to do with myself. I roam around. Try to work. Think about falling in love. I can’t help thinking of all the horrible things I’ve done to Flo and Frank.’
‘What things?’
There was a long pause.
‘I’ve never told anyone about this.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘Once, a long time ago, I ran away with another bloke. I was crazy about him. I didn’t care about anything else. I felt as if I’d just been born.’ She blushed and pushed her clasped hands between her thighs. ‘One night, walking along the street, I told him I loved him more than I loved Flo.’ She laughed. ‘I even thought it was true. Pathetic, isn’t it.’
‘No.’
‘Anyway. I wanted to go away with him. Frank, Frank cried, he got drunk and broke all the windows upstairs, kicked them in. I was so scared I fainted and fell down the stairs. It was the middle of the night. One of the girls downstairs picked me up and dusted me off. Frank was out in the street by that time chucking empty milk bottles around. She said, Frank’s being ridiculous. But he wasn’t.’ She breathed out sharply through her nose. ‘I went away with the other bloke. Flo was only about two, at the time. One morning I came back, on my way to work. I walked in the front door and in the lounge room I saw Flo sitting up in front of the television. She must have just woken up. She was all blurry and confused. She didn’t see me. She was sitting in an armchair with her feet sticking out, all by herself in the room. It was Sesame Street. And Frank came into the room with a bowl of Corn Flakes for her breakfast. He had this look – his face was – I can’t talk about this.’ Kathleen put her face on her arms on the back of the chair, lifted it up again, and went on. ‘He was trying to get ready for work and feed her and do everything. He was running.’
Neither of them spoke.
‘I suppose it doesn’t sound like much,’ said Kathleen.
‘Go on. I’m listening.’
‘Of course, I was absolutely miserable with this other bloke. I used to type his fucking essays for him. Jesus. He had this way of looking at my clothes. I couldn’t do anything right. He told me I was like a bull in the china shop. Of his heart.’ Again she tried to laugh. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this. There are some things I’ll never forgive myself for. That morning I was talking about. Never. I don’t know if you . . .’
Jenny leaned forward and spoke very clearly. ‘Listen, Kathleen. I’m nuts about Frank. Nuts about him.’
Flo, who had turned over on to her back with her knees splayed like a frog, drew herself together with a start and sat up.
‘Oh! I dreamed! Hullo Kath! Did I go to sleep? When are we going?’
‘Going where?’ said Jenny.
‘Down to the park to play on the swings, like you said at tea-time.’
‘That was hours ago, Floss. It’s nearly ten o’clock. And I’m only in my nightie.’
‘What if we all went down,’ said Kathleen. ‘Just for quarter of an hour.’
‘I only said that because I thought mothers were supposed to,’ said Jenny. ‘If I put a belt on, it will look like a dress.’
Outside the gate Flo galloped ahead with the dog. The two women came along slowly in the almost-dark. The sky, which was indigo, had withdrawn to the heights as if to make room for a sliver of moon, dark dusky yellow, rocked on its back like a cradle.
‘Kathleen? I don’t feel disgusted. Kath? When I met Frank, I knew he liked me, because he kept his body turned towards me all the time, wherever I was in the room. We were in a room with some other people. I didn’t know him.’
‘Frank and I had a dog, once. But he got a disease. He was going to die. I carried him to the vet wrapped up in an old blue coat. I put him on the table and they were going to give him an injection. We went walking in the Botanic Gardens, after we left him. We were both crying. Then we saw a bird hop in a bush.’
‘I dreamed about you and me becoming friends. I’ve been in Australia two years now, and I haven’t got a good girlfriend.’
‘But I was unbearable, the day we moved the furniture, and climbing in the window.’
‘You were always barging on to my territory.’
In the park, beside the concrete wall of the football ground, the women sat down close together on the shaven grass. There was a strong scent of gums, and earth.
‘Are you having a baby? Flo told me you might be.’
‘I thought I was pregnant, but not yet. I’m going to. I want to.’
Flo and the dog were tearing about in the thickening darkness, over by the swings and slides. They saw her leap up and grab the high end of the see-saw.
‘Hey! Come over here! Jenny? Kath? Come over!’ She was beckoning enthusiastically.
They got up and picked their way barefoot off the grass and across the lumpy gravel.
‘It’s a game,’ said Flo. ‘You two get on.’
They hesitated, glanced at each other and away again. Flo was nodding and smiling and raising her eyebrows, one hand holding the ridged wooden plank horizontal. They separated and walked away from each other, one to each end. They swung their legs over and placed themselves gingerly, easing their weight this way and that on the meandering board.
‘Let go, Floss.’
The child stepped back. Jenny, who was nearer the ground, gave a firm shove with one foot to send the plank into motion. It responded. It rose without haste, sweetly, to the level, steadied, and stopped.
They hung in the dark, airily balancing, motionless.
Other People’s Children
Madigan was a great lump of a fellow with yellow eyes, who bunched his thick fingers together in front of him when he entered a room, and walked with legs that seemed too heavy for the top of his body. His eyes bulged behind warped plastic-rimmed spectacles; his eye-lashes pressed against the lenses. Kin to Madigan were auto-didacts who transcribed reams from reference books in public libraries, sniffing and murmuring and grinding their teeth, wearing huge black vinyl gloves as they pushed the biro.
He lived with some hippies in a cavernous, ivy-covered house south of the Yarra. His room was a converted shed that sagged against the back fence. Madigan hid in there. Sometimes he would grit his teeth and go inside for a couple of hours to the kitchen where the others sat round the table under the hanging light bulb rolling joints and drinking Formosan tea, talking about massage and colonic irrigation, agreeing with each other, complaining soothingly in soft voices. He secretly despised the way their voices went up at the end of each sentence, as if they waited for a
pproval before continuing. When they talked, when they sighed ‘Ama-a-azing!’ he felt like a fox living in a chicken coop. But he needed them, for company, for human presence near him in the chilly house, and to buy food and cook it; and because without them he wouldn’t have had a room at all and would have had to offer himself to some soft-hearted feminist who would give him a roof and a side of the bed in exchange for his helplessness and the occasional surprise of his cutting humour.
They were kind people, though; vague, and years younger than he was. They patronised him and deferred to him and discussed him behind his back.
‘Madigan’s pretty well unemployable?’ they reassured each other. ‘He’ll probably never get his shit together?’
The women worked at odd things, tolerated the three children of one of them, cooked huge, ill-assorted vegetarian meals, and listened respectfully to the opinions of the men, all of whom were musicians of one stripe or another. If the men wanted meat, they had to go round the corner to the Greek’s.
Every second Tuesday Madigan dressed himself neatly, combed his colourless hair, and strolled to the dole office. When he got his cheque, he handed over to Myra his share of the rent and food money as faithfully as a good husband on pay day.
Madigan sat outside the State Library at lunch time, watching for normal life. His anxious nature, knotted as a mallee root with scruple and doubt, yearned towards a grey-haired man of fifty on a bench who bent earnestly over the hand of a woman, clasped her fingers with earnestness, leaned forward over their clasped fingers; all the while seagulls jostled rudely round their ankles, keeping up a chorus of ill-tempered cries and squawks. The woman stared straight ahead in her yellow cardigan, her mouth closed over false teeth, her feet in cheap sandals balancing stiffly on their heels, her toes pointing upwards at a forty-five degree angle. Was the man saying ‘Come back to me’? What had the man done, that she would not look at him on this public bench? Madigan turned away discreetly.
He mooned round milk bar windows looking for hand-lettered signs. He dreamed up small agonies over Wanted: one kitten preferably fluffy please call at number 5 Park Street and Mrs Day wanted: canary whistler will give good home. He passed the pubs in Gertrude Street and heard them, through the open door, singing Cuando cuando cuando cuando.
In the Eye Hospital Out-patients, the hooks of other people’s conversations lodged themselves amongst his nerves.
‘Cor,’ croaked a woman opposite him, noticing a mistake in her knitting. ‘Right in the flamin’ neck.’
‘What’s that woman?’ said her friend.
‘Vietnamese?’
‘Japanese.’
‘Could be Malay.’
‘No. Can’t be Malay. She hasn’t got the hair. Malays have got curly hair.’
‘See that girl over there who needed an interpreter? Well I think she’s from Italy. ’Cause she’s got Italy written on her bag.’
Madigan was from a town on the south coast of Queensland and he wished he could go back, he longed to go back, but he had to stay now, might as well, because he had lugged all his stuff down and was thinking of unpacking it, and because Margaret had finally been driven off the edge by his dithering, and because he was a professional, and he was going to work, though nobody down here had heard of him yet.
The last time he went up north to visit his parents, he hitched, carrying the harmonicas in an old cotton pillowcase. A fat, stupid couple picked him up. They stopped for petrol somewhere in the middle of a starry night. Madigan, thinking to be a guest, stepped out into the thick warm air, crossed to the roadhouse and bought three cans of drink. He went to the window of the car and offered a can to the man, who gave him a suspicious stare and shook his head. Madigan put the cans in his bag and returned to the back seat. The fat, stupid man screwed himself round to speak over the seat.
‘Funny thing happened,’ said the man. ‘Bloke just come up to me window and asked me if I wanted a tin of drink.’
Madigan’s mother was squat, bow-legged, fearful, dim. She believed that everything wrong in the world was due to the influence of some cult or other. His father worked for the local council. Madigan borrowed twenty dollars from his mother one morning after his father had left for work, and wandered up to the main street, carrying his harps and wondering if he had the stamina to busk. He went into an espresso bar to think about it and sat down at the table next to the tinted window, with the twenty dollars in his pocket. As the cappuccino popped its creamy bubbles pleasantly before him, a rhythmic movement low down on the footpath outside the window caught his eye. He glanced down and saw his father crawl past on his hands and knees. He was smoothing out fresh concrete.
Drinking coffee made Madigan nervous, anyway.
He was back in Melbourne for the next dole day. They gave him a job, which he accepted willingly, washing dishes in a restaurant. He told the others at home that he was pearl-diving, giving it a weary professional ring. They laughed fondly. Myra imagined him standing at the sink in his dream, up to the elbows in greasy water, the shrill thunder of the restaurant kitchen battering round his ears. He wouldn’t last three days in a job where you had to work fast. She leaned across the table to give his arm an affectionate press. He saw the hand coming, the fingers stained green by cheap copper rings, and jerked back out of her reach with a look of panic, then tried to transform his reaction into a suave movement towards the teapot. He thought Myra was probably on the look-out for a man in her life, a responsible chap, someone to look after the kids. Or maybe she even wanted to fuck him. Oh God. He bolted out the back and into his shed and under the eiderdown. His hands were all wrinkly and ridged from the hot water. Maybe he should buy some rubber gloves. He could think about that tomorrow.
*
In another kitchen four or five miles up the Punt Road bus route, a match scratched and the little flower of gas blossomed. It was six thirty in the morning. No one would have been fool enough to address Scotty before the first coffee had coursed in her bloodstream. She stood sternly at the stove in her loose pyjamas and waited for the kettle. She rolled out the griller and saw mouse-marks in the chop fat; on the bench ants thronged round an open jam jar. She clicked her tongue, lowered her imposing brow, and massacred the ants with a hot, wrung-out dish-cloth. Then she seized a red texta and a sheet of butcher paper from the table drawer and wrote in a smooth teacher’s script:
I wish people who were ‘into’ midnight ‘munchies’
would develop an ant and mouse ‘consciousness’.
She sticky-taped the notice to the glass of the back door so that everyone would see it on their way out to the lavatory, and stepped out on to the bricks. There was a small bony moon very high up in a clear sky. The sun itself was not yet visible but was casting a pink light on to the underside of leaves. She planted her feet in the grass, rolled the pyjama pants up to her knees, and began to bend and stretch. She was a straight-backed, dark-haired girl with firm flesh on her and plenty of it. Her feet were high-arched, her ankles hollow. She thought she was too fat, but she was flexible as she bent this way and that, her movements severely graceful. Her round face, which fell habitually into a disgruntled expression, smoothed itself with concentration. Sweat began to gleam on her broad forehead.
Someone came out the door behind her. Scotty stopped, doubled over with her legs wide apart and her head hanging between her knees. It was Ruth, with a guilty expression and a white china potty in one hand, heading for the lavatory. She hurried past.
Water rushed in the wooden stall and she emerged.
‘I know I should walk out to the dunny at night, like you do, Scotty,’ she called, risking it.
‘Oh, don’t defer to me, Ruth. I make myself sick. I’m such a fucking puritan.’ Scotty straightened up, flushing. ‘I hate those meetings. They’re just fights with somebody taking notes.’
Ruth came across the grass, her smooth, Irish-jawed face confused with sleep and troublesome thoughts, her thatch of reddish hair standing on end. They looked at each
other for a moment, without expression.
‘I’m sorry, Ruth,’ said Scotty.
‘So am I. I get that wild with you I don’t know what I’m saying.’
‘I hate it when we fight. Specially about the kids.’
‘So do I,’ said Ruth. ‘I heard you go out the door last night. I started wondering if there’s something about me that makes people go out in a rage and slam the door. Jim was always doing it.’
‘I was miserable.’
‘Miserable? I thought you were just mad, and sick of me.’
‘Of course I was miserable! Look at my tongue – it’s covered in ulcers! Jesus, Ruth – what do you think I am?’
Ruth looked down at her bony feet in the grass. ‘Sometimes I wonder what you’re feelin’. Or even if you’re feelin’. You’re always so rational. You’ve got the gift of the gab. I can’t keep up.’
‘I’ve been trained to have the gift of the gab,’ said Scotty, ‘and that’s what you liked about me at the beginning. You thought because I could talk I must know more than you. And so you wanted me to tell you what to do – be your mother, a bit. And now you see I’m just ordinary – got feet of clay – you sort of can’t forgive me.’
In Ruth’s eyes shone a beam of dogged loyalty to old friendship. ‘I got nothin’ against clay,’ she said. ‘It’s what our plates are made of – what we eat off every day.’
Scotty laughed. ‘You should write songs.’
The sky rippled with smooth bars of pink and gold. People were stirring inside the house. A door slammed, a child’s voice was raised in anger, or mirth.
‘The lines aren’t drawn yet, are they, Scotty?’
‘I hope not.’
‘What if we blow it?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Here, Scott. Give us a hug.’
They were dissolved. Ruth was tall enough for Scotty’s head to lie on her shoulder. Such hopes they had had! It was a moment of grace, beyond will or reason, and might never be repeated. They let go.