Honour & Other People's Children

by Helen Garner

  Bunches of dried flowers (dead flowers to Scotty, who had no use for souvenirs) hanging from the curtain rod along the kitchen windows were symbols, for Ruth, of what had been and what she alone was faithful to. Where had the laughter gone? In the old house they had laughed till they ached, in convulsions of hilarity: joints before breakfast, spiky electrocuted haircuts, improvisations in foreign accents, gentle family jokes (Laurel trying to remember Moby Dick and coming up with ‘Dick Shark’), acid trips when the little girls had clowned to entertain them and Ruth and Scotty had lain against the furniture weeping with laughter, dying with laughter.

  The institution of Telling Life Stories had gone swimmingly at the old house, once a week, in each of the bedrooms in turn: the cups of tea, the packets of Iced Vo-Vos and Chocolate Royals, the knitting, the open fire, the horror stories that any childhood will turn up: ‘My father read my mail and found the contraceptive pills.’ ‘He was driving so fast I thought I could just open the door and jump out.’ ‘When I got home from school my mother . . . my mother . . .’ ‘He came into the bathroom and I was in the bath with my sister and he said, Who did it?’ ‘They took her away and I never saw her again.’ ‘She died.’ ‘I was afraid to open my mouth.’

  For Scotty, this was over. They had been through it once, once was enough; the sound of her own voice droning the ossified facts disgusted her. But Ruth wanted it again, to show Alex how it was done; she wanted to keep something alive, to build a bulwark against the draining away of the recent past through neglected channels. Scotty gave in ungraciously, Alex out of curiosity. Ruth went first. She told and told, with that dull gleam of eye, mirthless smile, slow mastication of detail: and Scotty fell asleep, a crime for which Ruth would never forgive her. ‘I was drunk,’ said Scotty afterwards, grinning with shame. ‘I got bored! I slept for two hours and when I woke up you were still in grade three.’ Alex gave an embarrassed laugh, and flipped a tortoise shell guitar pick between his fingers. Ruth glared at the floor. Scotty, trying to make amends in the name of domestic peace, offered to tell her own story the following week. She produced an elegantly edited version of her thirty years, studded with ironic jokes against herself and tailored stories of travel in countries the others had never been to: ‘The music went on for three days and three nights; I had pneumonia and a nun looked after me; we crossed the river at dawn; I went into this room and there was more coke on the table than you’d ever dream of seeing in all your life; when I got to his place and saw the mattress on the floor I thought, Let me out of here!’

  At the end of it the others sat in silence, frustrated and confused. They were none the wiser about Scotty’s personality – or rather, she had not given away any little weaknesses, which was of course the unspoken reason for these sessions: let us bare our weak points so I won’t have to be afraid of you any more.

  Scotty was seriously bored. It had much less to do with Ruth than Ruth imagined. She suffered from boredom as a condition. She would sink into it, would be up to her neck in it, without having a name for it. She had no way of concealing it, of making herself gracious in spite of it. At school her kids held it at bay: their sexual restlessness she understood, and they made her laugh with their strangled English; but at home it came creeping into the marrow of her bones. She ate too much, furtively devoured Easter eggs, muffins, half packets of Vita-Weats thick with butter in the middle of the night on her way back from the lavatory. After these binges she would fade into anxious sadness, an obsession with the deed; guilt, shame, lack of energy; a desire to turn back time, to sleep away what she had done, to be free again of the load taken on; fear of ugliness; weariness; despair; self-disgust at the failure of will. It was part of the condition that she could not talk about it. She would wander round her room, try on all her clothes, grieve because none of them hung loosely on her; she would unbutton her overalls, drop them to her ankles and dully examine her body in profile, holding her shirt up under her breasts. She longed miserably to hack off the offending flesh, to have it surgically removed in some secret clinic. If Ruth came striding into her room while she was lying there after work, black-faced, struggling with this loathing of herself, hiding behind a book, if Ruth sat down and sighed comfortably and pulled out the packet of Drum, Scotty’s discourteous grunt of greeting was the best she could do. She wanted to scream, Shock me! but she couldn’t be bothered. Ruth would take the crude hint, gather up her tobacco and papers and matches and go quietly, closing the door behind her. It was all on Scotty’s terms. Nothing Ruth said succeeded. Scotty was sick of the old fooleries. She wanted nastier mirth, to say the unforgivable, to purge herself of her disgust. With her ignorant certainties she rudely crushed Ruth’s stirrings of intellectual curiosity.

  ‘The Great Wall of China can be seen from the moon,’ said Ruth.

  ‘Oh bullshit,’ said Scotty crabbily. ‘It can’t, can it, Alex?’

  ‘Why don’t we buy an encyclopaedia?’ said Alex the science graduate, the diplomat, refusing once again the unenviable role of Solomon.

  When Scotty went on the night train to Mildura for her term holidays, she bought a postcard at the station of a certain local geological formation called The Walls of China and sent it to Ruth with the inscription, ‘Reckon you can see this from the moon as well?’ Ruth was hurt and cross; but some dregs of rough affection in the message touched her obscurely, and she looked at the postcard front and back for a long time and then stuck it in Labour and Monopoly Capital as a bookmark. None of them ever looked up the disputed factoid. Indeed, the peculiar angle of the dismal little piece of information made it hard to classify: Wall? Moon? China?

  Ruth enjoyed starting sentences with ‘us deserted wives’, ‘us single mums’, invoking with a sniff and a twisted grin the sisterhood of adversity. Into her bones had sunk wisdoms such as All good things must come to an end, Life’s a struggle. With casual relish she related tales of disaster and pain. ‘If there was one thing Sarah didn’t need, it was a caesarian, after the childhood she had.’ ‘They took one look at him and he was full of it – they just sewed him back up again.’ Over the morning paper she narrowed her green eyes, pursed her lips, drew in hissing breaths, gave ironic nods of suspicion vindicated, and made vague political predictions. ‘The pressure’s buildin’ up,’ she would say, ominously. ‘The lid’s gonna blow off any minute.’

  ‘We had the radio on while we were fuckin’,’ she told Alex in the kitchen. ‘An’, the news come on and they announced the PKIU only got a five dollar rise. Dennis’s cock went all limp. We couldn’t go on.’

  She gave an odd, triumphant laugh of excitement, her eyes gleaming dully.

  ‘Wouldn’t it have been better to fuck more, instead of less?’ mumbled Alex, who was flossing his teeth. ‘That way you would have been defying the badness, if you see what I mean. Making a stand for human contact.’

  ‘What are you, a hippy?’ said Ruth

  At that moment Alex noticed Dennis, eyes down, coming up the path between the kitchen door and the lavatory.

  ‘Look at that blond head,’ Alex remarked enviously to Ruth.’ I always think blonds are more . . . sort of blessed than other people.’

  Ruth stared. ‘What sort of an idea’s that? How can a Jew come out with a thing like that?’

  ‘There is a faint flicker of Nazism in it, isn’t there,’ said Alex, sawing away with the waxy cotton.

  ‘More than a flicker!’

  ‘I nearly said holy, actually,’ said Alex, laughing. He was not fazed by ideological rebukes, though goodness knows he had enough of them to contend with in this household, of every conceivable brand.

  Alex and Scotty came out the front door on their way to the gig. Ruth’s bedroom light was still on.

  ‘Bloody house meetings – just an excuse to get stuck into each other.’

  ‘No wonder she hates you,’ said Alex, stowing his guitar in the back and buckling his seat belt. He revved the motor and they swooped away on to the road. ‘Look at you – all dressed up to g
o out on the town, and she’s in her room bawling.’

  ‘Oh, don’t you start!’ said Scotty. ‘Why does everyone think I’ve got no feelings?’

  ‘You do seem to cope,’ said Alex.

  ‘Somebody has to cope! And once you start, they expect you to cope for them as well, and you’re never allowed to drop your bundle ever again – and then the buggers hate you and tell you you’re authoritarian!’

  ‘Maybe that’s why we hate our fathers,’ said Alex in his maddeningly reasonable tone.

  ‘Oh shut up.’ Scotty stuck her elbow out the window and slouched in her seat. The car, open to smooth streams of night air, cruised down Punt Road and crossed the river.

  Outside the back door of the pub, Scotty said, ‘I might just hang round out here till it starts.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Come inside and talk to us.’ Alex was standing sideways on the step with his guitar case in his hand.

  ‘No. I don’t want to look like a moll.’

  Alex laughed and went in without her. She leaned against the wall and looked up and down the street. A tram passed, light and square as a cage, making the asphalt tremble under her feet. She thought about Ruth at the meeting, her grim face and set jaw, her determined pessimism, the way she dragged on the cigarette as she ground into words the grist of her resentment. Strung tight as new fence wire, Scotty’s shoulders ached with self-control. She let out a mean sob.

  ‘Shut up, idiot,’ she snarled out loud.

  Under the rows of knobbily pruned plane trees came three Aborigines, a man and two women, stumbling cheerfully home. The man saw Scotty leaning there in the dark with her hands in her pockets, knee bent, one foot back against the wall, and sang out,

  ‘Hul-lo my son! How you going?’

  ‘Good thanks,’ she called back, knowing that her voice would betray her sex and embarrass him.

  ‘Ooooh! It’s a girl!’ shrieked one of the women, and they all went off into gales of laughter. ‘Sorry!’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Scotty, blushing.

  ‘Good night love!’ They rolled on by, a jolly trio smelling pleasantly of beer.

  ‘Good night,’ said Scotty.

  She turned on her heel and went round the corner and into the pub.

  It was crowded and red-dark inside. She shouldered her way to the bar and ordered a scotch, propped herself with her back to the bar, and downed it in one gulp. Ruth swam away. Scotty hated parties, but liked pubs, for here she had no social responsibilities: everything was paid for and the deal was clear. She did not like social drinking, or beer, or wine. She liked to get rapidly and efficiently drunk on something hard and dance it all off and go home alone, and anything more was just somebody else’s fantasy. ‘Drinking is between me and the bottle,’ she had said once when Ruth and Dennis offered her a beer at the kitchen table. ‘No one else has anything to do with it.’ The memory of this remark made Scotty flinch with shame. She hated talking about herself, and imagined such statements being repeated mockingly behind her back.

  She found herself a spot between the bar and the cigarette machine and drank quietly through the first awkward, cold bracket, when the speckled concrete floor was bare and she was not going to be first. She watched the roadie’s blond head gleam green in the light over the desk, the swing of his arm as he brought the cigarette to his lips, his hands hovering over the board sneaking the volume up with each song; she saw the band one after another twist in their ear-plugs as the sound turned bitter and clattered tinnily among the rafters; she drank scotch until the taste of it no longer withered her and it started to do its job on her stiff righteous joints; she drank scotch and ice, and by the break she was oiled up and loose. She waited.

  She felt the ripple of attention run through the crowd, a turning of heads and bodies towards the lit stage, and away they went again on a riff she knew by heart from hearing it a thousand times through her bedroom floor at night. She battled down to the front of the band where she could watch Alex, whose face took on a resoluteness, a sweet grimace of concentration: her feet were lifted surely off the sticky floor and she was dancing, whisked up and washed away in the oceanic commotion of sweating bodies, in the same unfailing bliss engendered by hot swimming pools full of screaming kids. She heard Alex pick up the riff and his teeth flashed as he began to grin to himself and she was grinning too and before she closed her eyes she saw sweat flying round the drummer’s head like a little net cap sewn with pearls and she closed her eyes, she was herself for herself with no skin to hold her in, and to the wincing man in distorted spectacles standing pressed against the side of a speaker box her face was as open and tender as that of someone blissed out on some mind-expanding drug – that naked face and powerful body – better steer clear of her, she looked dangerous.

  Watching her, Madigan suddenly thought of a film he had once seen, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in which two women, one dark, one fair, both big and graceful as racehorses, strode like colossi among puny millionaires or muscled giants whose personalities had been pumped into their biceps. An odd run of expressions passed across Madigan’s face: sourness, envy, admiration, suspicion. She wasn’t stupid, that girl dancing with her eyes shut: she had just slipped her moorings, and he wished he could do the same.

  The music stopped and she opened her eyes, giddy, not knowing which way she was facing. She had her back to the stage and tears all over her face, and there was someone standing in front of her talking to her, a Hawaiian shirt and glasses and shoulders hunched inwards.

  ‘Do I know you?’ she asked stupidly.

  ‘I came to your house once,’ he said. ‘To visit Alex.’ He was peering down at her through ugly spectacles. His eyes were watery and seemed to want to burst through the glass: his lashes spread against the lenses. She thought perhaps she remembered him, his childish shoes, feet pointing straight ahead.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘It’s the curse of all bespectacled people. People think you’re looking at them funny, or sexy, and you’re really just trying to see who they are.’

  ‘I’m having a bit of trouble with that question myself at the moment.’

  ‘Which question?’ He stared right into her eyes, perfectly serious.

  ‘Oh, never mind. You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘You’re not crying, are you?’ He glanced nervously left and right to see if anyone else had noticed that she was still giving the odd sniff.

  ‘Want to make something of it?’

  He laughed a peculiar gusty laugh, hyuk hyuk, too loud, as if someone had formally told a joke. His breath smelled sweet. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t take you on,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’ she said in a pugnacious tone.

  He composed his features into a debonair expression. ‘I keep running into strong women who are looking for a weak man to dominate them, as Andy Warhol said. Although I hate Andy Warhol and all that New York stuff.’

  Scotty laughed. ‘I’m looking for someone to flatten, actually.’

  ‘You can flatten me.’ He spread out his arms. ‘It’d be easy.’

  ‘Don’t be a dag.’

  ‘Well, buy me a drink, then. Please.’

  She looked at him sharply. He had a very thick, white neck. ‘On the bite, are you.’

  He nodded and blinked.

  ‘The direct approach always works on me.’ She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand and he followed her to the bar.

  ‘Do you actually like this sort of music?’ His oyster eyes, distorted by the spectacles, narrowed as he raised the glass of beer.

  ‘Of course,’ said Scotty indifferently. She sucked a mouthful of scotch through the ice.

  ‘It’s not to my taste,’ he said. ‘At least . . . I don’t think it is. Still . . . everyone’s much more professional in the city. Specially this side of the river.’ He stuck out his chin, expecting contradiction, but she merely replied,

  ‘Why don’t you get proper glasses?’

/>   ‘I had some once. Gold.’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘I had this girlfriend up north, and at the vital moment I failed to make a declaration of passion, so she jumped on my glasses and went to Europe.’

  Scotty laughed. She looked him up and down. He stuck one hand in his pocket and with the other tilted the glass so that a few drops of the beer ran down his throat. He pretended to whistle, looking behind him.

  Alex came shouldering through the mob, sweaty and shiny.

  ‘G’day, Madigan. What’s the matter, Scotty? I saw you crying. You looked really small.’ He grabbed the back of her hair and yanked at it.

  ‘I’m OK,’ said Scotty. She nodded at Madigan. ‘He’s not sure if he likes the music all that much.’

  Alex turned to him. ‘Oh yeah?’

  Madigan took a deep breath and rushed it. ‘It’s too New Yorkish, and violent. And decadent. What’s it got to do with Australian people’s lives? Why don’t you play music for ordinary Australians?’ He was panting, staring earnestly into Alex’s face.

  ‘If you want to see some “ordinary Australians”,’ said Alex, controlling himself with difficulty, ‘come out to a Saturday night gig in Ringwood sometime, mate.’

  Madigan fixed him insistently with his protruding eyes. ‘No, not them. I mean the mums and dads. Mr and Mrs Normal.’ Scotty butted in, clenching fists and teeth. ‘Mr and Mrs Normal? This is rock and roll, you dag.’

  She cast Madigan a look that would have floored him had he not summoned up all his nervy, scrupulous tenacity to deflect it: he was older than Scotty, and more romantic, and probably even more bitter. Their stares locked, then dropped apart in a kind of hostile respect. Scotty turned abruptly and strode away towards the lavatory. The men raised their eyebrows at each other.

  ‘I like Scotty,’ said Madigan who, to Alex’s stupefaction, now showed no sign of agitation. Completely composed, breathing in a regular rhythm, Madigan held up thumb and forefinger a hair’s breadth apart. ‘That cool she’s got – it’s about this deep.’ His attention wandered. Alex saw his gaze blur, slide, then suddenly sharpen and focus. ‘Any chance of a blow with you blokes?’ he said in a fresh tone, hearty and humble.