by Helen Garner
‘Where’d you go?’ said Ruth.
‘Oh, I ended up at Alex’s gig,’ said Scotty. She recommenced the exercises and her voice came and went among her limbs, punctuated with sharp expulsions of breath. ‘I met this guy.’
‘Oo, hoo! Did you go home with him?’
‘Hang on! I met this guy, who Alex knew, and we had a drink, and after the gig we drove him home, and he was weird.’
‘You didn’t go home with him then?’
‘I didn’t get out of the car. Thank goodness.’
‘Aaaah.’ Ruth was disappointed. She was a one-man woman, and when she went out it was to visit friends in familiar houses, or to talk politics in pubs, or to meetings, not to dance and drink too much whisky and stagger home with strangers.
‘I’m not a hooer, you know.’ Scotty stood up at last, her cheeks shining and damp. ‘I’m not a band moll.’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Ruth hastily.
A raffish grey dog bounded into the kitchen, followed by a girl in a pink dressing-gown. The dressing-gown cord was tied in a neat bow round her portly little torso. She had thousands of freckles and the pale, blinking countenance of the bespectacled. Her large feet were shod in pink slippers with pom poms; and she had tried to flatten the waves of her hair with a series of bobby-pins crossed at strategic points. Something matronly about her, at eight years old, pierced grown-ups’ hearts, but her eyes were watchful with the plain child’s pride. She went straight to a chair and sat holding the dog’s head between her knees and picking the crusty sleep out of the corners of its eyes.
‘Good morning, Laurel,’ said Scotty.
Laurel looked up. ‘Polly’s silly,’ she remarked. ‘You give her a b-a-l-l and she chews it to bits. You give her a b-o-n-e and she just buries it.’
‘What’s a b-o-n?’ said a thick voice at the door.
‘Bone, Wally, you idiot,’ cried Laurel in sudden rage.
‘Don’t call your brother an idiot,’ said Ruth.
‘Yeah. Shut your face, fatty,’ said the boy. ‘Come on, Poll.’ He clapped his hands in front of the dog and it began to leap off the ground as high as his shoulder. At the height of each leap it seemed to hang for a second in mid-air, ears flying, legs dangling, like a jelly-fish in deep water. It emitted sharp yips.
‘Get the dog outside,’ said Scotty, in the level voice of someone accustomed to being obeyed.
Wally looked up resentfully, but he had felt the flat of Scotty’s hand before when his mother was not about, so he ushered the dog out and slammed the screen door behind it.
Whenever Ruth washed herself with Johnson’s baby soap, she remembered when Laurel was a baby. They lived in a tall, dark terrace house with a yard full of useless sheds, behind which, when they moved in, she had found stuffed dozens of blood-soaked sanitary pads, dry and crackly and blackened. In the kitchen were two old troughs. She brought hot water in from the bathroom in a plastic bucket. The floor was of brick. Once the dog had surprised a rat among the paper bags in the cupboard under the sink: the dog bristled and roared, Ruth screamed, the rat thrashed about among the bags (they could only hear it) and shot suddenly into view through a crack, up the wall and out through a gap in the timber round an ill-fitted pipe.
With the Johnson’s baby soap she ran her slippery hands gently over Laurel’s solid body; the water in the plastic tub lapped sweetly, her hands slid and met no resistance; the baby’s head lolled in her palm, her hands moved effortlessly at the child’s flesh.
Jim was never there, except for dinner when he would cheerfully ram food into his large mouth, kiss her and dash off out the front door. He came home at four in the morning smelling of beer and sometimes perfume. He had crowds of friends at university. He told her he had set himself up at a table in the union building behind a sign saying Any questions answered 20 cents. He sat eagerly, cross-legged, talking, talking, talking. He even stole from her her own stories: once she had woken in the night, feeling something was wrong; she ran into the baby’s room and found Laurel sitting up in the cot, clinging to the bars and staring at the overturned radiator which had already burned its way right through the matting and one layer of lino – flames were starting to lick up round it. Bullshit, he said with a laugh. There weren’t any flames! And I got there first. There was only a lot of smoke and you panicked. He never told her she was stupid in so many words, but she felt he thought so, and she became stupid, frightened of words of more than one syllable, thick-thoughted, easily confused by anyone with a ready tongue.
They never went anywhere, never went out into the country looking for firewood or mushrooms, never went drinking together in pubs, for he was always in company and none of them liked her. Once he shat his pants from laughing. He swaggered in bow-legged, still grinning, and dropped the stained jeans and underpants on the bathroom floor for her to wash them. Once, when she cried about her life, stuck there in the house with Laurel and the dog, he had taken her with him to the pub. She slid herself behind the long table, and the talking faces swung towards her for a second, summed her up and – worse than dismissed – smiled blankly. She knew one of the women from her own cut-short university days. The woman nodded to her. Ruth drank in silence, holding the baby on her lap, as the voices shrieked around her. Some of them were doing a play and seemed to be conversing in lines from the script, which made no sense to her but set the others roaring. One of the men, in a pause in the talk, raised his glass and stared at Ruth and said in a loud, hearty voice,
‘I see some of us have brought their wives with them tonight. Let’s hear it for ’em’ – and farted with his pursed lips. No one said anything. Then Jim sprang to his feet and seized the man’s collar in mock rage.
‘Come on – let’s step outside,’ he said. The man laughed and they exchanged joking cuffs to the ear, then sank back into their places, honour satisfied. The volume of sound swelled again and Ruth was forgotten. She sat with flaming cheeks, and blushed and blushed until the backs of her eyes sang.
When Jim woke up, it was too late. She didn’t love him any more. She didn’t love anyone. She had the other child and breast-fed him in a dream; she weaned him and washed the milk off the front of her clothes and lost two stone and sat all day in one of the downstairs rooms reading pamphlets. Now it was her turn to be out all the time. She was mean, he said. She said, ‘If you’re not here to take the kids on the dot of ten tomorrow you won’t be seeing them again.’ He danced about in a kind of hysterical sulking. She stood unmoved by the door. He saw she meant it. He was there on the dot of ten, but she wasn’t. She was round the corner at a friend’s place, waiting for ten fifteen before she came home. If there was one thing Ruth understood, it was the power of absence. Away he went in the old Holden with Wally asleep in his basket on the back seat and Laurel waving out the side window. When they weren’t there she didn’t know what to do with herself. She wandered round the city in darned clothes that hung off her, staring at herself in windows. In a big shop full of silky dresses she heard a man singing in a high-pitched, yearning voice, which entered unobstructed into her hollow head,
‘Helpless, helpless, help-less . . .’
She didn’t think about the words, but tears ran down her face.
She told Jim to go. He cried,
‘But I still love you. What am I going to do with the love?’
It was a word that neither of them had yet learned the meaning of.
She was quite calm inside, watching him writhe flat on his face on the bed. Hadn’t he ever cried before? His sobs were like vomiting, so hard was it for him to bring up grief.
‘It’s too late, Jimmy,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I’m hurting you, but it’s too late.’
‘You’re not keeping both the kids, are you? Oh,’ he wept. ‘Let me take Wally.’ He sat up and wiped his eyes. Wrinkles she had never noticed before fanned out from his eyes, cut like brackets round his mouth. ‘I promise, I promise I’ll look after him. I couldn’t bear it if you kept them both.’
/>
Laurel was the one she had been lost in, lost with. While Ruth had roamed the empty rooms, unreachable, Laurel had plodded after her; once, while Ruth raged to herself, Laurel had punched herself in the head with a dull rhythm. They were bound together in that history. Jim took Wally, who was still not much more than a baby, and they went away over to the west in a big red ambulance he bought with his university pay. He would live, somehow. He didn’t live anywhere, with the kid. They slept in the red ambulance, picked up other travellers, camped on beaches under squares of flapping canvas, were dirty and bitten and, finally, happy.
Once Wally walked barefoot along a hot, terrible beach north of Perth, trailing after Jim who was looking for a creek. Wally had forgotten his hat and his father hadn’t noticed. That night the little boy was in fits, spewing; his body was racked, his eyes rolled back in his head and Jim was seized with mortal fear, less of death than of the dumb face of Ruth. He threw the child into the ambulance and sped to the nearest town, his heart beating and stinging in the backs of his hands, glancing sideways at the flat creature beside him on the front seat. The doctor took one look at the ragged man, wild-haired and burnt black, and said to the nurse,
‘Give the kid gamma globulin. It could be hep.’
It wasn’t. Wally had a history now: ‘Once I walked a hundred miles in bare feet,’ he would relate long after to his mother, who had many times imagined him ill, wrapped sweating in rags on some stranger’s kitchen floor while his father ranted at the table behind him; ‘and I got heat inzaustion and they gave me three needles in my bum.’ Wally was thin and dirty with little muscles like string and pearly down in elegant whorls along his backbone.
Meanwhile, Ruth knew that if she were not to take out her guilt on Laurel she must find company, people to pick loose the threads that bound the burden to her. She dragged the kid in her glasses to the big house she had heard talk of. She walked in the back gate and saw a woman, a solid brown-skinned big-muscled girl in a flowery dress, bending over the vegetable garden yanking up weeds. They had seen each other at one of the meetings, perhaps. The dark woman looked at Ruth.
‘Help,’ said Ruth. ‘Can I come and live here? Have you got a . . .’
The dark woman stood there with her feet balancing squarely on two great blocks of bluestone, an uprooted weed dangling from her left hand.
‘Come inside and we’ll have a cup of tea,’ said Scotty.
Logically, Jim got busted for dope. There was no one with the money to bail him out, and they would have taken Wally away from him had not Ruth got on the train and come for the kid. He was a wild little boy. He had never eaten off a plate in his life: he knew that the most reliable joy to be had was a packet of hot chips against the chest. He was burnt to a crust, and his foot-soles were thickly callused. His blue eyes penetrated. He had reverence for nothing, as his father had taught him. His response to discipline was to show his bum. But when his mother came to get him, a strange thing happened. They took one look at each other and fell in love. He would sit on her lap while she smoked, and slip his grubby little hand under her shirt and flip her breasts this way and that, his face a dream of contentment. He would stroke her face with his hard paw, sing to her in his croaky voice: ‘Woothy, my Woo,’ he sang, swooning on her bosom.
Laurel was too big to be cuddled and too proud to ask for it. She stood about wretchedly in doorways. Scotty tried. Scotty loved her, there was no doubt, in the tentative way in which we love other people’s children, fearful of rejection, even of mockery, loving without rights, thanklessly. Scotty’s love was awkward, and intellectual. Laurel would bring to Scotty the teacher her difficult questions.
‘Scotty, is Robinson Crusoe a myth or a legend?’
‘Scotty, got any idea how to draw a hamster?’
‘Scotty, do you believe in changelings?’
‘In what?’ said Scotty, who was reading the paper.
‘Changelings. When a baby is born and they swap you for another baby and nobody knows.’
‘I don’t think they make mistakes like that in modern hospitals.’
Laurel made a quick movement of impatience. ‘Not in hospitals,’ she said. ‘Fairies come and take you away. And put an ugly fairy baby or goblin instead.’
‘Better not let your mother hear you talking about fairies,’ said Scotty casually. She looked up at the girl’s round face on the other side of the table.
‘I was reading this book,’ pursued Laurel, ‘and it said, Once there was a mother and goblins had stolen her child out of the cradle. In its place they laid a changeling with a thick head and staring eyes who did nothing but eat and drink.’
Scotty laughed, then saw her false step. Laurel’s face was stricken. ‘Are you worried about it or something?’
‘It sounds like me.’
‘Oh Lol.’
‘It does. A thick head and staring eyes.’
‘I love the way you look.’
‘You’re only saying that to make me feel better.’ Laurel’s gaze was relentless.
‘I once heard another story,’ said Scotty carefully, dredging it up from memory, ‘about a man who had two children. I think he was an Arab. One child was handsome and charming and popular, and the other was plain and clever. And another man came to visit, and while he was there he saw the two children and noticed how different they looked, and he asked the father, “Which of your two children do you find more beautiful?” thinking he would have to say “The elder”. But the father thought a while, and finally he said, “He whom the heart loves is ever the most beautiful”.’
Laurel said nothing, looking steadily into Scotty’s eyes, but Scotty could see the flexing of iris as thoughts passed through her solemn head.
‘I also eat too much,’ said Laurel at last.
‘You are not fat.’
‘My face is fat.’
‘It’s puppy fat.’
‘Yours wasn’t.’
‘I still eat too much,’ said Scotty, whose empty plate was encrusted with muesli.
‘Why do some people eat a lot and stay thin, like Wally, and other people eat the same amount and get fat, like you and me?’
‘I eat more when I’m miserable,’ said Scotty. ‘Anyway we are not fat.’
‘Wally said I was fat. He said it at school.’
‘Wally is a shit.’
‘No he isn’t.’ Laurel went red. ‘He just doesn’t want me to be his sister when there are other kids around.’
‘Well, isn’t that shitty?’
‘He probably can’t help it,’ said Laurel. ‘He’s not proud of me.’
‘I am.’
‘But you’re not in my family.’
‘I can’t change that,’ said Scotty, and looked away.
‘No matter how much you love me,’ Laurel bored on doggedly, ‘you can never be my real mother.’
‘I know,’ said Scotty.
*
Breakfast fiddled with, lunches in brown paper bags, the two children straggled off across the park, Laurel casting looks over her shoulder to where Ruth and Scotty stood at the gate watching, still in their nighties. The Italian boys from over the back came jostling round the corner and absorbed Wally into their group, leaving Laurel to drift on alone. The red ribbon on her top knot shone at them until she turned the corner past the milk bar and disappeared. The women sat down on the stone step.
‘Remember when we had only Lol?’ said Scotty. ‘And I taught her to read, and we did the comic books, and she used to come and sleep with me?’
Ruth gave a brief laugh. ‘No good thinking about that now.’
‘But isn’t it weird how Wally’s changed everything.
Lol used to be a happy kid. Now she moons round after you all the time. It’s so important for Wal to be tough – he won’t have a bar of her. I think it’s sad.’
Ruth scrambled over to her open bedroom window and reached in for the packet of Drum on the table. The effort of forging thought into speech made her short of breath. W
henever she spoke of the troubles of her life, her accent broadened and she clipped her words off short. Her face came forward bearing the mirthless grin of resignation, neck awaited the yoke. ‘Wal’s lived most of his life on a beach,’ she said. ‘He’s not used to girls, or havin’ a sister.’
There was a silence. The school siren went for nine o’clock, and the sunny street was empty. What a fine pair they looked to the boiler-suited gardener turning on the hoses in the little park across the road: one short, one tall, sitting carelessly on their front step dressed in cotton, forearms resting on knees, feet bare upon the smooth brown-and-yellow-tiled path. The man waved good morning to them and they saluted back.
‘Another hot one?’ he sang out, bending down with his spanner to the hidden taps.
‘Looks like it,’ they chorused.
The man moved across the park, setting free one after another dense mists of spray shot through with faint rainbows, mauve, yellow and green. Through the floating cloud slashed the postman on his bike and held out a fan of letters to them at the gate. Scotty jumped up to take them.
‘Whacko! Pension day,’ said Ruth. She hung the cigarette from her bottom lip and ripped open the narrow envelope, scanning the cheque for deductions.
‘Money for nothing,’ joked Scotty, drowsy in the sun and late for work. ‘I should have had a kid after all. Given up teaching.’
‘You call that nothin’?’ snapped Ruth. ‘Bein’ a mother in this society?’
Scotty did not like being corrected. ‘Hmmmm,’ she said in her wry voice. ‘Just the same. It would have been different for me, if I’d had a kid now. It’s a different kind of decision these days from what it was before the women’s movement, when you had yours. If you had kids before the penny dropped, you’re in the clear, aren’t you. Proved yourself both ways.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Ruth suspiciously. She drew hard on her cigarette, baring her teeth and hissing in the smoke.
‘Just a thought.’ They paused, in a slight tension. ‘Anyway,’ Scotty went on, ‘what about the idea we talked about last night, before we started fighting? Why don’t we collectivise the house money?’