Honour & Other People's Children

by Helen Garner

  Ruth extended one long leg off the side of the path and poked about in the dirt with her toes. ‘I dunno.’

  ‘I think we ought to. I feel ashamed that I never realised before how much more I get than you.’

  Ruth fired up at once. ‘Ashamed? I don’t want you to feel ashamed!’

  ‘Well I do! I feel ashamed! Aren’t I allowed? Is feeling ashamed counter-revolutionary or something?’

  Ruth clamped her hand to her jaw and removed the cigarette. All the life went out of her voice as she said, staring out across the sunny road, ‘I’m sick ’n’ tired of havin’ my hand out to the rest of you.’

  ‘Tsk. Don’t look at it like that.’

  ‘It’s a bit hard not to.’

  ‘Why don’t you get a job?’

  ‘Nah,’ said Ruth. ‘I have to be here when the kids get home. The hours are no good. They can’t come home to an empty house.’

  ‘We could organise it,’ said Scotty. ‘That’s all it needs – organisation.’

  ‘Nah. When it comes to the crunch, the only people you can trust with your kids are other people with kids.’ Ruth flicked away her butt, stood up and stretched, thrusting her chin forward as if presenting her face to the elements, and showing the thick sandy hair under her arms. In that position she looked like a ship’s figurehead.

  ‘Life’s a struggle,’ she recited, letting out a sharp sigh and dropping her arms.

  ‘All shall be well / And all manner of things shall be well,’ quoted Scotty, to sustain the philosophic moment and to conceal the faint sting of hurt from Ruth’s last remark. But Ruth darted an irritated look over her shoulder as she opened the wire door and said,

  ‘I hate that sort of religious shit.’

  The cease-fire was over.

  *

  Alex believed the whole of western civilisation to have been justified by the invention of the saxophone. He played rhythm guitar in a rock and roll band. He was small and neatly made, with long, hard fingernails, pink Jewish lips, and bags under his eyes which, when he was very tired, tinted themselves a delicate shade of lilac. He drank too much coffee, too black, and read and practised all night because he couldn’t sleep: his blood was nervous and alert. Sometimes, past midnight, Ruth would hear him beating away softly with one foot in time with his playing. He liked there to be a guitar in the room, even if it was only leaning against a wall. In the kitchen, if he wasn’t playing, he was shelling peas into a saucepan, sharpening the knives, or gouging away with a rag at the tin of dubbin to polish his old brown shoes. He was never bored. Wally, who broke things and ran outside, made Alex quiet and wary, but Laurel he took into the room where the piano was and taught her to pick out a bass line with one finger.

  ‘Frequency means . . . often-ness,’ he would explain to her.

  ‘Often-ness,’ repeated the little girl thoughtfully.

  ‘Why don’t you teach her Botany Bay?’ said Ruth, sticking her head round the door.

  ‘I don’t know it.’

  ‘You’ve been culturally imperialised.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I bet I have more fun than you do.’

  After Ruth had stamped out of the house meeting and banged her bedroom door behind her, Scotty and Alex had been left at the table staring at their hands. The stillness of the dry yard crept in through the back door. A cricket scraped in the mint round the gully trap.

  ‘She can’t stand you, Scotty, can she,’ said Alex.

  Scotty, who had turned very red and stiff during the argument, forced out a high, difficult laugh. ‘We used to be like that,’ she said, holding up one hand with two fingers tightly crossed. ‘She’d put food in my mouth so I didn’t have to get sticky fingers.’

  ‘What happened?’ Alex tilted back his chair, reached behind him for the acoustic guitar, and began to pick at it.

  ‘She started hating me.’

  ‘But these things are never one-sided. There must have been a reason.’

  ‘You tell me and we’ll both know,’ said Scotty with a stubborn, ill-tempered grimace. ‘She doesn’t like my tone of voice, she says.’ Scotty disliked analysis; she wanted things to be just so, and for everyone to agree with her without wasting time.

  ‘Is it something to do with this house? You found it. You got the upstairs room.’

  ‘She could have had the upstairs room if she’d wanted it.’

  ‘You run a pretty trim ship, Scotty. Signs on the wall and soon.’

  ‘Anyone can put a sign on the wall.’

  ‘Yes, but they don’t, do they?’

  ‘There’s nothing to stop them.’

  ‘Don’t do your block.’ His hand shivered to make vibrato.

  Scotty twisted her mouth, half closed her eyes and drummed her fingers on the table in a pantomime of irritation. ‘You know something?’ she said. ‘When the other house got sold, Ruth cried for a week. I said to her, “Ruth, you must stop crying. We have to do something.” And she’d say, “Oh, don’t talk about it. I can’t even bear to think about it.” She was hopeless. She was talking about squatting and being a stay-put widow, and that sort of bullshit. Everyone but her and me had full-time jobs, so I had to go out looking by myself. And I couldn’t find anything big enough for the whole seven of us, so we had to split up. And you know what she said to me in one of these fights we’re always having now? She said, “I’ll never forgive you for the way you were at the end of Rowe Street. You were so cold and efficient – you didn’t seem to care. And for me it was the end of the world.” I was stunned.’

  ‘What was good about that house?’ said Alex. He kept on picking away, his face open and attentive.

  ‘Oh . . . for Ruth it was special, you know. She dragged herself out of that mess with Jim, and he took off with Wally. She fixed up her room, and planted her vegetables, and started up a new women’s group. It was a big household. Rosters. Telling life stories. Signs! When was the last time you saw a man round here with a broom in his hand? Revolution begins in the kitchen. The kids were everybody’s kids – Laurel and Sarah’s daughter used to call each other “my sister”. We thought everything we’d theorised about was coming true. Breaking down old structures, as we used to go round saying in those days.’

  ‘It almost sounds old-fashioned,’ said Alex.

  She laughed awkwardly and turned her face away from him. ‘It was a home, I guess,’ she said. ‘We were always laughing and singing and drawing pictures of ourselves. We loved each other. We couldn’t wait to get home at night.’

  In the quiet, the steel strings quivered and the guitar belly resounded warmly.

  ‘I’m jealous,’ said Alex.

  ‘Don’t worry. You pay later,’ said Scotty bitterly. ‘Look at us now.

  *

  Madigan accepted the cigarette because he thought that was what people probably did. He puffed amateurishly at it, roving round the room and expelling the smoke in a flat slice over his chin. He felt blunderous, as if he were occupying too much of the available space. The conversation was not successful: his voice seemed to him too loud, or too tentative, or too emphatic. In desperation he darted his myopic eyes round the kitchen in search of a new tack.

  ‘What’s in that bottle?’ he bellowed. ‘Gin?’

  ‘It’s Scotty’s,’ said Alex. ‘She calls it a mood improver. Pretty dangerous one for someone who’s in a bad mood as often as she is.’

  Madigan gave a hoot of nervous laughter.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Alex. ‘Make yourself at home.’

  ‘I will in a minute,’ said Madigan. He sat on the very edge of a chair, lumped his legs under the table, and rested his large forearms in Sphinx position across the cloth. His cigarette was at last sufficiently consumed for an attempt to be made at graceful disposal. He stabbed it into the ashtray and withdrew in relief, brushing one hand against the other. He had butted it imperfectly, however, and it continued to smoulder, releasing a thin grey column of smoke to the ceiling, betraying his discomfiture as surely as cooking sm
oke betrays the outlaw to his pursuer. Alex reached out one hand and crushed the butt against the china.

  Madigan edged over to the record player and squatted down beside the pile of records. ‘Hey! Billie Holiday!

  Whose is this?’

  ‘Scotty’s,’ said Alex.

  ‘They all belong to all of us,’ said Ruth at the same moment. She was crouching down to sort out rotten oranges from good in a wooden crate under the kitchen bench.

  ‘No – I mean who bought it,’ said Madigan.

  ‘Nobody in particular,’ insisted Ruth. ‘They’re everyone’s.’

  Madigan, with his back turned, rolled his eyes and clenched his teeth. He squatted there on his large haunches for ten minutes, working slowly through the stack, examining the covers, making a light hum of attention to the task.

  ‘I hear you’re making a record,’ he said at last.

  ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ said Alex.

  ‘Who’s producing it?’

  ‘Bloke called Everett Walker.’

  Madigan let out a snorting laugh. He stood up and drifted back to the table where Alex had picked up a biro and was doing the Age crossword. ‘Do you like Everett Walker?’

  Alex looked up. ‘Do you mean personally, or his work?’

  ‘Any way you like,’ said Madigan hastily, confused.

  ‘He’s all right, I suppose. We haven’t got much choice, at this stage of the game.’

  Madigan pointed his lips and put the fingers of one hand on the tabletop, keeping the other safely in his jacket pocket.

  ‘I don’t – there’s something – he talks too much,’ he said. ‘He’s got one of those mellow voices that seem to grow on you, like moss.’

  Alex laughed.

  Madigan drew a deep breath. ‘Don’t you think he’s a bit – sort of –’

  ‘What?’ said Alex, interested.

  ‘I can’t stand him!’ burst out Madigan. ‘He gets hold of bands like yours, that have a rough, human sound, and he makes them sound like a hospital trolley!’

  ‘Wow! You’re a master of simile!’ said Alex, in genuine admiration.

  Madigan looked at him sharply. ‘Do not patronise me, my handsome young fellow,’ he said with a peculiar frowning smile, ‘or I shall lash you with my clever, cutting tongue.’

  Alex started to laugh, and gestured with his hands palms upwards.

  ‘But how can you work with a bloke like Everett Walker?’ cried Madigan in another spasm of agitation. ‘I mean – how do you prevent him from riding roughshod over you?’

  ‘Oh, you just give him the steely smile and the cold shoulder,’ said Alex airily. He picked up his guitar and held it across his lap.

  ‘You old softie,’ said Ruth, who had been taking in this male pantomime. ‘You never gave anyone the cold shoulder in your life.’ She laughed.

  ‘I did so,’ said Alex.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno. Someone.’

  ‘Everett Walker actually came to our house once,’ said Madigan.

  ‘Into your actual house?’ said Ruth.

  ‘And sat at our actual table, in our actual kitchen, and drank an actual cup of tea.’

  ‘Gosh,’ said Ruth.

  ‘I thought you couldn’t stand him,’ said Alex.

  ‘Oh, he didn’t come to see me,’ said Madigan. ‘He was talking to Tony about some deal or other. Anyway I tipped the sugar bowl over his head.’

  ‘You what?’ Alex stared.

  ‘Oh, he started bandying about words like zen and off the wall and laid back and talking about Jah, and everyone was listening to him so idolatrously that as usual I was at the end of my tether. So I grabbed the sugar bowl and tipped it over his head and ran out of the house.’ His eyes quivered behind the lenses, like fish in a tank.

  Ruth and Alex laughed with new respect. They had gathered closer to Madigan where he sat and were gazing at him with such shameless curiosity that he edged further away and fidgeted the salt and pepper about on the table. Alex ran off a few absent-minded riffs. ‘Well,’ he said, with a turned-down smile. ‘That answers the question I was going to ask you, I guess.’

  ‘Which one was that?’

  ‘That’s why I asked you over, as a matter of fact. I thought maybe you’d like a bit of – you know – session work.’

  ‘Who, me?’ said Madigan. ‘You mean, on your record?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Madigan uttered an incomprehensible sound somewhere between a laugh and a shriek. ‘That’ll teach me to keep my smart cracks to myself,’ he mumbled. He flung up his arms and clasped his hands behind his head, squeezing his eyes shut and opening his big mouth very wide. As they stared, his face became quite peaceful.

  The grimace relaxed, a smile curved the lips, the eyes opened as if he had had a refreshing sleep.

  ‘Want to have a blow?’ he said, colouring up. Ruth went back to the sink and put the plug in.

  ‘OK. Have you got your harps?’

  Madigan leaned down behind him and produced the pillow-case from its hiding place round the corner in the hallway. ‘What’ll we play?’ he said. ‘Down at my place they always want to play Rose of San Antone.’

  ‘Don’t know that one,’ said Alex.

  ‘Play Love Hurts,’ said Ruth.

  ‘That’s American imperialism, isn’t it?’ said Alex.

  ‘Yeah. But it does, doesn’t it. Hurt,’ said Ruth.

  Alex laughed. ‘I wouldn’t know. Would you?’ He looked at Madigan who was burrowing among the metal.

  ‘Love’s just romance, isn’t it?’ said Madigan uncertainly. ‘Hollywood, and that?’ He chose a harmonica from the jumble and ran it back and forth between his thrust-out lips. ‘We don’t have to play a song,’ he said, sipping at the instrument. ‘Let’s just mess around. You could do hand-claps, Ruth.’

  ‘Go on! Do Love Hurts!’ cried Ruth. She flung the dishcloth into the sink. ‘You know how it goes, Alex! Like on the record!’

  Alex nodded, planted his feet against the table edge and chopped out a deliberate rhythm for her, which Madigan, inspired by this unexpected burst of exuberance, punctuated with elegant flourishes of breath.

  I know it isn’t true

  I know it isn’t true

  Love is just a lie

  Meant to make you blue

  sang Ruth. She was smiling with half-closed eyes; she twirled around on the red concrete floor, clapping her hands and swinging her long limbs with a lively vigour and cheerfulness. Was this the same Ruth? thought Alex; the one who wore the harness of gloom? She was moving like a queen, light-footed, open-handed, full of pleasure and grace.

  ‘Love hurts /Love hurts / Love hurts . . .’ Ruth’s voice faded out, just like the record, and the three of them laughed and looked away from each other in that mixture of embarrassment and almost tearful joy that comes after wariness has been shed.

  ‘That was nice!’ said Madigan. ‘It’s like those country pubs you go to up the backblocks of New South Wales – they always have a blond woman with big tits and a microphone, and she sings like this’ – he threw back his head and bawled – ‘LA International Airport! / Where the big jet engines roar!’

  Before Ruth could react to this remark, the door opened and into the room stepped Scotty in her crêpe-soled shoes, home from work and not in the mood. She stumped silently across the room heading for the loaf of bread.

  Madigan looked up, blinking. ‘Hullo!’ he said brightly. ‘You must be Scotty. I’ve heard about you!’

  ‘Have you indeed,’ said Scotty, hacking away at the bread.

  Madigan stared at her in puzzlement. No one spoke, but Alex saw, with a quickening of the heart, the blade of light that flashed from Ruth’s eyes into Scotty’s heedless back.

  ‘We were just having a blow,’ said Madigan. ‘Want to join in? Sing a bit?’

  ‘You don’t give up, do you,’ said Scotty, keeping her eyes on what she was doing. She slammed the fridge door shut with her knee and tramped out of
the room with a bulging sandwich in her fist.

  ‘Yikes!’ said Madigan. ‘Did I say something wrong?’

  ‘The boss comes home,’ said Ruth.

  ‘I thought you didn’t have bosses in these sorts of houses,’ said Madigan.

  There was no answer. Madigan could not read their expressions, and chattered on regardless. ‘Still, I suppose it must be hard to cater for everyone’s tastes, in a commune. One person’s under the shower singing Old Father Thames and all the others like new wave.’ He laughed, looking from face to face.

  ‘It’d take too long to explain,’ said Alex.

  ‘Here come the kids,’ said Ruth.

  *

  ‘Know what there is on the way to school?’ said Wally, getting reluctantly into the bath.

  ‘No. What,’ said Scotty.

  ‘A big drawing on a wall. Of a great big dick.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘With balls ’n’ everythink.’

  ‘And sperm coming out?’

  ‘No. Just a little hole at the end. But guess what. I come past there with Laurel, and guess what. I said, Look at that great big dick. And she said, That’s not a dick, that’s a thumb. Even with that knob on it ’n’ everythink!’ He laughed, screwing up his face and hugging himself with glee.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Scotty. ‘Here. Wash your face.’ She wrung out the washer and held it out to him.

  ‘Has it been on your cunt?’ said Wally with his slow, insolent smile, not taking his hands out of the water.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Do you know my dad?’ said Wally.

  ‘No. I’ve never met him.’

  ‘He’s great.’

  ‘Is he?’ She shook the washer, waiting for him to take it.

  ‘He wouldn’t like you,’ said Wally.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Oh, he just wouldn’t.’

  Scotty looked at him meditatively. She took one step forward and stood over him, the washer steaming in her hand. He seized it hastily, but his rapid wipe did not erase a knowingness which made Scotty glance behind her to the empty doorway.

  ‘Get a move on, will you?’ she said. ‘I have to go and pick up Laurel from tap. You can stay here. But listen to me. You are not to go down to the creek, do you hear me?’