by Helen Garner
‘Aw. Why not?’
‘Because you’re clean, that’s why. And because the creek’s polluted.’
‘Big fat bum,’ whispered Wally into the washer.
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothin’.’ He stood up, gripped the side of the bath with both hands, and clambered out on to the mat. He shook himself like a dog, his little penis flipping up and down.
‘Where’s Ruth?’ he said.
‘At the laundromat. She’ll be home any minute.’
‘Good,’ said Wally daringly. He took the towel from her hand and buried his grinning face in it.
To the watery strains of The Good Ship Lollypop and the tremendous reverberating thunder of forty little girls in metal shoes, Scotty climbed the stairs of the warehouse and lined up with the mothers in a damp corridor. The music stopped, the big door opened at the end of the hall, and out streamed a river of children, their heads at breast-height to the waiting women; they flowed steadily along through the narrow run, shoving like sheep in a race. Scotty searched for Laurel, but all the faces pointed with determination in the same direction, not looking up, the elbows working like pistons. There was Laurel’s big red ribbon.
‘Lol!’ Scotty put out a hand and tapped the child’s shoulder. ‘How was it?’
Laurel’s face was trying hard not to collapse. ‘Awful,’ she said. She inserted herself between Scotty and the wall and sheltered there from the surging bodies. Scotty took her hand and looked down at her pink-framed glasses, her large feet in the shoes with their jauntily-tied ribbons.
‘What do you mean, awful?’
‘I couldn’t do it.’
‘But it was only your first time.’
‘They went too fast for me. They put me in the back row and told me to copy the girls in front, and I couldn’t see the teacher, and the kids next to me knew how to do it and they laughed at me.’ She buried her face in Scotty’s belly.
The crowd was dispersing rapidly. ‘Bloody shits,’ said Scotty. She was ready to kill. With her arms round Laurel she threw up her head and stared round for the teacher. Out came a little old woman in tap shoes, clacketing along the floorboards. She saw Laurel and Scotty and a look of concern changed her face under the thick creamy make-up.
‘My dear!’ she cried, clicketing and clacketing up to them. ‘Oh, you’re crying! I thought you weren’t having much fun. Is this your mother, darling?’
‘Yes – I mean no,’ sobbed Laurel, taking her face off Scotty’s trousers and trying to wipe her eyes.
‘But don’t worry about crying!’ said the teacher, tremulously dabbing at Laurel’s cheeks with her hanky. ‘It’s good that you cried! It shows how much you care about doing it well!’ Her legs were hard with muscle, but quivering with age and fatigue. Her eyebrows were plucked to the thinnest line and lipstick had leaked into the wrinkles round her mouth. Beside her Scotty was a giant in her flat runners. Laurel’s freckled cheeks were flushed, her glasses awry, but she had stopped crying; her curiosity at seeing the teacher at such close quarters distracted her from her humiliation.
Scotty said to the teacher. ‘We’ll be all right. We’ll probably be back next week.’
Laurel squeezed her fingers imploringly.
‘If we feel up to it,’ added Scotty.
The teacher nodded and watched them anxiously as they went, padding and clacketing, along the empty hall.
Laurel heaved a sigh. ‘I thought it was going to be fun,’ she said.
‘Aren’t you supposed to take off the shoes?’ said Scotty, as Laurel clattered down the stairs and out on to the footpath, holding her hand.
‘I don’t even care,’ said Laurel. ‘I hope nobody thinks I’m ever coming back here. Because I’m not.’ She tore off the shoes and flung them into the back of the car.
‘Adversity is very character-forming, I’m told,’ said Scotty. They got into the front seat.
‘What’s adversity?’ said Laurel.
‘Hard times. Hard life.’ Scotty turned on the ignition.
‘Can we go and get a souvlaki?’ said Laurel.
‘You’ll get fat, like me, if you don’t look out.’
‘Oh, why do you even worry about it?’
*
On a balmy, greyish afternoon when autumn breezes buffeted, Madigan dozed the hours away under the eiderdown. Each time he woke he was surprised to find he had been asleep: the angle of the light had shifted along his flecked wall, the household noises had ebbed into silence; into his mouth ran the sweet taste of fresh saliva. After school when the stampeding feet woke him for good, he stumbled down to the park with two of Myra’s boys and played kick-to-kick with them till teatime. Their cries were mysterious to Madigan, who winced and shied away from their rough bodies because of his spectacles. ‘Jezza!’ they shrieked, plunging after the tight leather; ‘Thommo!’ with a dying fall.
‘You boys better get home,’ said Madigan at last. ‘Myra will be wondering where you are.’
He was always surprised when they obeyed him; he did not realise that they liked him because he addressed them in exactly the same tone of seriousness that he used in talking to grown-ups, instead of acting out for other adults present the little play called ‘Talking to Children’. They pelted off ahead of him, and he saw them ripple over the zebra crossing and vanish round the corner.
When they had gone the air was utterly still. Swallows passed like a handful of flung pebbles. Darkness swarmed under the thick-leafed trees. It was as if darkness and not light were the force. The orange gravel of the intersecting paths was lurid with the struggle of darkness against light. The water of the lake was not water but some thick, gluey substance incapable of movement. Ducks forced their way across its surface, moving in formation, dragging a wake of arrowheads. Madigan began to walk quickly home, keeping close to the fence.
He reached the hollow lighted kitchen with relief. Myra was standing at the stove with an apron tied round her waist. She was talking with animated gestures to one of the unfairly glamorous girls from over the road whom Madigan privately referred to as ‘the girls with the bee-stung lips’.
‘It had this great big skirt?’ said Myra, stirring, ‘made with –’ (she groped for the word) ‘– abundant material?’
Madigan always felt like bursting into applause when he witnessed one of Myra’s raids on the inarticulate. He sat down at the table and unbuttoned his jacket.
‘Madigan,’ said the smallest boy. ‘When we start eating, will you keep sitting next to me?’
‘Why, Harry?’
‘Because I like you, and I like you to sit next to me,’ said Harry.
‘All right.’
‘Thank you,’ said the boy in a soft contented murmur, and leaned against Madigan’s side.
‘Don’t mention it.’ Madigan blinked and blinked, half-dazzled by the bare bulb which dangled over his head. The great chimney-place opposite him was stuffed with old newspapers. The girl with the bee-stung lips drifted out of the room in a patchouli cloud, layers of worn crêpe swaying round her booted ankles. A faint odour of dope clung around Myra’s solid person as she delivered the steaming pan to the centre of the table.
‘Oh, not soup again!’ groaned the eldest boy, putting his spoon down with a crash and turning away in disgust to rest his face in the palm of his hand.
‘You should be grateful to your mother,’ said Madigan severely. His glasses fogged up in the steam that rose from his plate. He began to transport the soup to his mouth, tilting the bowl at the correct angle and closing his lips round the spoon so as not to make slurping noises. Myra served the three children and herself. ‘Mmmmm! Flavoursome soup, Myra!’ said Madigan in the cheerful, encouraging tone of a husband in a television commercial. Blinking rapidly, he pursed his lips for the next spoonful. The bored boy, watching Madigan’s exemplary table manners, suddenly laughed out loud. His mother dealt him a ringing blow to the side of the head.
‘Get to your room!’ she shouted, flushing with embar
rassment and rage. ‘How dare you?’ She glanced at Madigan who was staring, bewildered, spoon raised, dimly aware that this unpleasantness had been provoked by some oblivious act of his own. Harry had dozed off against Madigan’s arm, and the middle boy, having seen the lie of the land, was shovelling soup into his mouth as silently as he could, darting his eyes left and right as his brother left the room red-faced and furious, holding back tears.
The children were dispatched and the two grown-ups finished the meal in silence.
‘Where is everyone?’ said Madigan.
‘I’m here,’ said Myra, looking into her empty bowl.
‘No, I meant the others. Tony and the blokes.’
‘I don’t know. Gone to play, I guess.’ Myra went over to the sink and turned on the tap.
‘Don’t wash up,’ said Madigan vaguely. ‘I’ll do it later.’
‘It’s all right. Don’t you get sick of washing up, doing it all day?’
‘They sacked me, didn’t I tell you?’
‘What for?’ Myra already wrist-deep in water, reddened again with indignation on his behalf.
‘Oh, I’m a pretty slow worker,’ he said. ‘They don’t have to give a reason. Probably got someone with ambition.’ He laughed and rolled his eyes at her.
‘Well, I think that’s terrible.’
‘Who’s staying home with the kids tonight?’ said Madigan.
‘Me.’
There was not even a hint of resentment in her voice. Her patience drove Madigan to distraction. Why didn’t she jack up? Blokes never did anything unless forced. He’d better buy her a book, or something.
‘Are you going out?’ she said.
‘Oh, I might. Later on.’
She ground away with a piece of Jex at the saucepan bottom. Madigan looked at her feet in the loose sheepskin boots, patiently parallel at the sink, and felt like tearing his hair.
‘What about a game of Scrabble?’ he said with an effort. Myra turned round with a shy smile. She must have been pretty once, but her face had puffed up and her belly had gone and she was always announcing diets and then lying about it: the bee-stung girls would walk in and find her giggling guiltily behind the kitchen door with a slab of carrot cake in each hand and crumbs all round her mouth. Her eager kindness excruciated Madigan. Someone like him couldn’t afford to be around sadness like hers.
‘I’ll play,’ she said, ‘but I’m not very good at it.’
Madigan turned away to hide the gnashing of his teeth, and pulled the maroon cardboard box out of the drawer. Myra wrung out the dish-mop, banged it firmly to separate its white strands, and hung it on the tap under the sign Tony had put up saying Washing glasses in soapy water makes the beer go flat. She sat down opposite Madigan, blushing with pleasure, and Madigan laid out the board and the little wooden racks with his thick graceless hands which always trembled slightly, and they played a slow game, painstakingly placing the creamy tiles in their squares, cogitating without haste, for neither of them possessed the killer instinct. The alarm clock sat upon the table with a woollen tea-cosy to muffle its tick; its face looked foolishly askew up the spout-hole.
From the front bedroom came sounds of struggle, fierce giggling, feet running away. The big front door slammed violently and Harry set up a wail. Madigan glanced up but Myra, soothed by mental effort and adult companionship, went on placidly contemplating her move, one eye squinted against the smoke of the joint which Madigan had declined to share. Harry’s weeping, moving very slowly closer, was becoming heart-rending.
‘Is it good for him to cry like that?’ said Madigan, shifting in his seat.
‘Of course,’ said Myra briskly. She did not take her eyes off the board.
‘But – to go on forcing it out, long after there’s nothing left? So his whole body aches?’
‘He’ll stop when he’s sick of it.’
Harry sidled in, swollen-faced. ‘I got no one to play with, and no one to look after me,’ he said thickly.
‘You’re not the only one with that problem, me lad,’ said Myra, chin in hand, still not looking up.
‘Steady on, My!’ said Madigan, shocked and impressed by her tough tone.
Harry slid up to his mother’s legs. She took him on to her lap, one hand outstretched with a tile ready to place. She slipped her other hand up under his jumper and tickled his sweaty back. He took a big quivering breath, let it out again and relaxed against her. Madigan winked at him and clicked his tongue, but Harry was not ready to smile.
‘Would you pay CON?’ said Myra.
‘Oh . . . I don’t think so. I don’t know,’ said Madigan, who was slipping, himself, into a faint dream of comfort.
‘Tsk. Come on. Don’t be wishy-washy. Would you pay it?’ She swung her head up to look at him, her eyes blank with concentration.
‘Harry,’ said Madigan. ‘Run up to my room and get the dictionary, will you?’
‘He can’t read,’ said Myra.
‘It’s a big thick book with red and yellow stripes.’
Harry trotted away and returned with the right book.
‘Good on you,’ they cried.
He smiled tremulously and slipped back on to Myra’s knee. Absently she soothed him, playing all the while.
‘Those big boys are bullies,’ she said, ‘sometimes. It’s one of the things I should try to knock out of them.’
‘Maybe the events of their lives will knock it out of them,’ said Madigan.
‘I’m an event in their lives.’
Madigan sat hypnotised by her certainty, her deft handling of what to him were looming imponderables: children’s distress, their nastier character traits, the future. He recognised the danger signals in himself: a slight swooning sensation, a physical comfort drawn directly from the fact that she achieved this balancing without even looking up from the game. He pulled himself together and stood up abruptly from the table.
‘I think I’ll go out,’ he announced.
Myra looked up, aware that by some false move she had forfeited his company. ‘Thanks for the game,’ she said, completely without irony.
‘Don’t thank me, Myra,’ he ground out, and bolted from the room.
*
Dennis shot things at weekends. He told Ruth she lived with dilettantes who were up themselves. His smile looked more like a snarl. Ruth took pride in being the only one who could handle him when he was drunk. Once Scotty had walked into Ruth’s room without knocking and seen them lying together: Dennis’s face was turned towards her over Ruth’s shoulder, his white teeth were bared, his eyes glazed. For a second Scotty thought there was murder: then she realised they were fucking. His pale blue eyes looked at her but did not see. She ran.
Dennis never stayed for breakfast, but slipped away to work as soon as it was light. Anyone who had left a bedroom door ajar might at the instant of waking glimpse the loose dangle of his arm, sense the quiet disturbance of his passing, a blondness, thread of tobacco smoke, sponge of boot-sole.
Dennis was always leaving. Ruth, who longed to be his ally in a struggle larger than their own lives, who longed to be like him (blunt-minded, phlegmatic, wary of easy levity – virtues, she imagined, of his class), did not protest; but sometimes when he knelt over her to say goodbye, when he searched her face, she felt herself swell and grow puffy with sadness. She reproduced, not consciously but by the osmosis of desire, his ungrammatical speech, his flat vowels and truncated cadences. She called people ‘mate’, professed impatience with subtleties: ‘I can’t stand all this stuff about colours,’ she would declare, folding her arms over her flowered apron. ‘All this shit about “Is that puce?” “No, it’s more like magenta”, when it’s really just purple or dark red.’ She roughened up her manners and her childhood memories, so that one Sunday when her father came to call, Alex and Scotty were agape at his rounded, jovial tones, his casual bandying of literary references.
Ruth waited for Dennis at night, long after Laurel and Wally had dropped off and the ironing was done a
nd the kitchen set to rights. Towards midnight her ears were tuned to the scrape of the back door on the matting. She would put on her flannelette nightie and her glasses and get under the blanket and open Labour and Monopoly Capital and begin the plodding task, the mountainous journey she conceived between her history and his. He would come in and find her asleep with the light on, the book still upright on her chest between her loosened fingers.
She captured him one Sunday.
‘Stay,’ she said. ‘Oh, go on. I’ll get your breakfast in bed.’
Half laughing, half frowning, he gave in. She kicked off her felt slippers, galloped to the shop for milk and bread, trotted to the kitchen and set up the little wooden tray for him. Scotty stumped in and cut up a grapefruit with a serrated knife, facing straight ahead to discourage conversation. Ruth was in the state of silly over-cheerfulness seen in those whom love has made happy. She swung her hip to bump against Scotty’s as they stood side by side at the bench and hissed,
‘Been fuckin’ all night. Stink like an alley-cat on heat.’
‘Charming.’ Scotty, who had slept the righteous sleep of the loveless, turned a slow look of distaste upon her. ‘What was that crash on the front verandah at one o’clock this morning?’
‘Oh that!’ said Ruth with a grin. ‘Dennis was a bit pissed ’n’ we had a fight ’n’ he ran out ’n’ jumped on me pushbike. Bent it.’ She giggled. ‘He give me some money to get it fixed, but.’
Scotty’s mouth curled in disgust. ‘What an oaf,’ she said. ‘I hate men.’
‘Get yourself a real one,’ said Ruth cheerfully. ‘Not one o’ them soft-talkin’ Carlton types.’ She hoisted the tray breast-high and strode out of the room.
‘Yoo hoo!’ she yelled. ‘Tea-oh!’ She pushed the bedroom door open with one knee, and stopped. Dennis had slipped back into slumber. A narrow strip of sunlight lay across his broad face, across the pillow and the creamcoloured blanket with its faded blue stripe. His hair was messy and yellow. A grey shadow fell around his eyes, described a curve across the breadth of his cheeks. He was breathing very quietly.