by Helen Garner
‘I’ll do it,’ she said, tossing him a neutral look. ‘Last person here from up north spent hours breaking the kindling up into icy-pole sticks. Queensland people don’t know how to make fires.’
Off the hook. ‘Don’t they?’ he said. ‘I’ll have to think about that.’ He was struggling with a wave of that smooth, insidious comfort that rinsed away his confidence. ‘Blokes these days,’ he said in a murmur. ‘Competent young women like you . . . it can be rather a humbling experience.’
‘Don’t get too abject.’ She skilfully constructed a fire and put a match to it. It took, and she squatted in front of it watching the flames run along dry sticks. ‘I haven’t lost the knack,’ she said, and gave a little closed-mouth laugh.
‘I like you, Scotty,’ he said, surprising himself, for he had at that moment felt the first twinge of rebellion.
She gave him a quick, suspicious look over her shoulder, but he was smiling at her quite openly, standing there with his feet close together and his hands by his sides like a tin soldier.
The room had darkened, and in the steadily gaining light of the fire, yellow and pink in the cave of blackened bricks, the table and chairs behind them grew larger and loomed more mysteriously.
‘I once lived with this woman up in Queensland,’ said Madigan in a rush. ‘She was sort of – hubba hubba. She wore dresses made out of hundreds of coloured scarves, and those hippy oils that make you smell like a sweet biscuit, and sandals with high heels, and her hair went right down her back, and what a voice! She used to drive me wild. I should have had a baby with her.’
‘A baby? What’s that got to do with it?’
‘Isn’t that what people do?’ said Madigan, still standing behind her.
‘It might have been once, I suppose.’
‘Oh, the world hasn’t changed all that much, has it?’ He gave a hearty laugh. ‘You, for example. You could marry some nice bloke and have a family.’
‘Come off it,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I’ve had my tubes tied.’
Madigan winced.
‘Want to see my scar?’ She stood up, pulled out her shirt and undid the top of her jeans to show him an inch of belly.
He forced himself to cast a glance at this immodest flesh, then turned away towards the fire. It was burning merrily. He gulped. There was a pause. Scotty tucked her shirt back into her jeans and squatted down.
‘Didn’t leave much of a mark, did it.’ His voice was colourless, but his eyes blinked violently, pressing their lashes, bending them against the glass.
‘Didn’t hurt, either,’ said Scotty. ‘Know what? Just as I went under the anaesthetic, I could hear the radio in the operating theatre. It was Simon and Garfunkel, and they were singing Cecilia, you’re breaking my heart / You’re shaking my confidence daily.’ She laughed, and sang a verse. ‘Makin’ love in the afternoon / With Cecilia up in my bedroom / I got up to wash my face / When I come back to bed / Someone’s taken my place.’
Madigan looked at her with a twisted smile. ‘Are you trying to tell me something?’ he said with difficulty.
‘No.’ Her smile faded. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It doesn’t matter. I just thought . . .’
They stared into the fire.
‘I suppose you’ve had an abortion too, have you.’ His voice was as conversational as Wally’s had been at the front door.
‘Two, actually. Why?’
‘I must be old-fashioned, or something. I can’t get used to it.’
‘You a Catholic, are you?’
‘I can make up my own mind, thanks very much.’
‘I had a religious conversion when I was twenty-two,’ she said. ‘Baptised, confirmed the lot. It only lasted two weeks. I was an Anglican.’ She laughed.
‘That woman I was telling you about,’ he said. ‘She had very compelling eyes. Her eyes were empty of everything but compulsion.’
He moved forward and leaned his arms against the mantelpiece, so that she could not see his face. Something in the angle of his leg and foot was child-like to her: Paddle shoes, free milk at playtime.
‘What’ll we talk about now?’ she said.
‘Do you think I could stay the night?’ he said in a muffled voice.
They lay on their backs like a pair of carvings on a tomb.
‘The wind’s getting up,’ she said. ‘Listen to it thumping in the chimney.’
He said nothing, but stared at the plaster garlands of the ceiling through his ugly spectacles, hands under his head.
‘Aren’t you going to take your glasses off?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Are you sleepy?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t even know your first name,’ said Scotty.
‘I avoid using it. It makes me sound like a potato.’
‘What is it?’
‘Leo. Don’t tell anyone.’
‘What’s wrong with that? It’s Irish.’
‘Go to the top of the class.’
‘Wasn’t there a Pope Leo?’
‘Half a dozen, probably,’ he said, discreetly slipping his glasses on to the floor under the bed.
‘Well. Do you like your last name?’
‘You’ll try anything, won’t you,’ he said.
‘Just want to keep things rolling along,’ said Scotty. She reached out one arm and switched off the lamp. ‘We don’t have to fuck, if that’s what’s bothering you.’
He flinched. ‘I thought that’s what you people over here meant by inviting a bloke to stay the night.’
‘It was your idea, not mine. What do you think we are, monsters? Let’s go to sleep.’
He started to toss himself round in the bed, turning first his back to her and then his face with an unreadable expression on it: an angry, laughing, cynical grimace. ‘I should go to sleep,’ he mumbled. ‘I should go home.’
‘Well, go ahead! If you want to!’
‘No no no! It’s too far. I haven’t got enough money for a taxi.’
‘Stop thrashing round, will you? You’ve pulled the blankets right out at the bottom with your great feet.’
‘Oh, what am I doing here?’ he cried suddenly. ‘I’m never going to cut the mustard over this side of the river. I go crazy at home because no one takes anything seriously except dope, and then I come over here like a humble pilgrim, cap in hand, and I get taken so seriously I nearly die, of panic, or boredom. I try to remain aloof, suspicious, sceptical and yet trusting – isn’t that how it’s done?’ His eyes were bulging.
‘How what’s done?’ said Scotty, with an incredulous laugh.
He rounded on her. ‘Well, make a joke, if you don’t want me to get serious!’
‘Sorry!’ she said. ‘I thought it was a joke!’
‘You lot think everything’s a joke.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Well, don’t poke fun at a bloke.’
It was like watching a war through a telescope: she could see skirmishes, wild rushes of movement to and fro, but was unable to tell whether there was a tactical intelligence in command, or whether all was lost and the armies were taking flight.
‘The gulf between being awake and being asleep is infinitesimal,’ he shouted, half mad with wakefulness, ‘but it’s unbridgeable!’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want to have fallen into a deep sleep five minutes ago!’
‘Do you want me to tickle your back?’ she said helplessly.
‘I’ll accept anything, at the moment.’ He turned his broad, pink back to her, and she pulled up his ratty singlet and began to tickle him with her fingernails, making artistic patterns and swirls and not staying in the same place too long.
He flashed her a peculiar, almost malevolent smile over his shoulder. ‘If you were a fightin’ woman,’ he said, ‘you’d have thrown me out by now! You’d have said, “What sort of a place do you think this is we’re running?”’
‘Oh shut up smartypants,’ she said, furious. ‘Sleep or don’t sleep
. I don’t care.’
There was a short silence. Then he laughed quietly, and said, ‘Good on you, Scotty. Sweet dreams.’
They fell asleep at last, back to back on the hard low bed.
The kids were playing pleasantly in the kitchen. Scotty brushed Wally’s hair, his fly-away white straw, and clipped Laurel’s toenails, and they sat in a row in the morning sun outside the back door. Laurel got out her finger-knitting and toiled away at it, breathing heavily through her nose.
‘Look, Scotty,’ she said. ‘I can finger-knit. But I can’t make it turn round and go the other way.’
A small brisk breeze ran round the garden. Wally stumbled about on his stilts in the damp grass, singing and laughing to himself. Red leaves on top of the gum tree skittered and sparkled in the wind.
‘Do you think it’s going to be warm today?’ said Scotty.
‘Turn on the radio and find out,’ said Wally sensibly.
‘I feel rather happy,’ said Scotty. ‘It’s a bit like the olden days, don’t you think?’
‘We weren’t born in the olden days,’ said Laurel, smiling at Scotty and pushing her glasses up her nose with the back of her wrist. ‘So we don’t know. Do we.’
Scotty crept back into her room and stood at the table. When she turned round she saw that Madigan was awake, lying on his back watching her with his eyes half-closed. Without his spectacles, the whole area of skin round his eyes looked tender and defenceless; his lips were dark red, his pale cheeks blurred with a shimmer of new whisker.
‘You look funny,’ he said, ‘standing there in that position.’
‘Funny?’
‘Yes. You sort of pull your mouth down and it gives you a double chin.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
‘Was I really unbearable last night?’
‘No more than you are this morning.’
‘What’ve I said?’
‘I love being told I’ve got a double chin and look funny.’
‘You’re tough enough to take the truth, aren’t you?’
‘I know the truth already,’ she said, ‘about the way I look.’
‘Sometimes you look real pretty. And other times your face is. . .kind of . . .lumpy.’
‘I know all this! You don’t have to tell me! I don’t think I’m beautiful!’
‘I’m not either,’ he said. ‘I know I’m just a clod who can play the mouth organ.’
‘I like the way you look.’
He pulled a frog-face and laughed. ‘Cut it out, Scotty. You make me feel like a matinee idol.’
‘How did we get on to this subject, anyway?’ she said.
‘I was just watching you. I like you, Scotty. Come here.’
She took two steps towards the bed and he flung himself at her knees and tumbled her down beside him. She fell stiffly. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Put your head on my shoulder. That’s right. Don’t take too much notice of me. I’m in shock, a lot of the time. Come on, leave your head there. People ought to be able to be nice to each other sometimes. Not crying, are you?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘There’s some funny liquid coming out my eyes.’
He felt her face with his fingertips. ‘I think they’re tears, Scotty.’
She started to laugh in weak, silly fits, and he kept holding her head gently between his neck and shoulder.
‘Ruth’s going to leave, I think,’ she said, ‘and she’ll take Laurel with her.’
‘Isn’t the boy hers too?’
‘Yes. But Laurel’s been mine.’
‘Oh. I get it.’
‘I thought you didn’t understand new-fangled ideas.’
‘I know what it is to like a kid, for Christ’s sake.’
The sun was slanting through the faded pink curtains, making the wooden floor hum with brightness.
‘Want me to read you a story?’ he said.
‘All right.’
He picked up a book from beside the bed and looked at its cover. It was one of Laurel’s. ‘The Juniper Tree,’ he announced in a state school ‘interesting’ voice. ‘Let’s read a page each. I’ll start. It was a long time ago now, as much as two thousand years maybe, that there was a rich man and he had a wife and she was beautiful and good, and they loved each other very much but they had no children . . .’
When it was her turn she feared to offend with her unpopular tone of voice, but he suddenly seized her head in both hands and kissed her violently on the mouth. ‘What a nice voice you’ve got!’ he said. ‘I’ve never really heard it before.’
‘It’s a teacher’s voice,’ she said.
‘I love it,’ he said casually. ‘My turn. She began to hate the little boy and would push him around from one corner to the other and push him here and pinch him there so that the poor child was always in a fright. When he came home from school there was no quiet place where he could be.’
‘This is a bit close to the bone,’ said Scotty.
‘It’s only a simple story,’ he said, looking up and marking his place with one finger.
‘That’s what’s so terrible about it,’ said Scotty. ‘It’s so ordinary and familiar.’ She tried to wipe the tears away surreptitiously with the corner of the sheet.
‘Bear up, Scotty!’
‘Aren’t I allowed to cry at a sad story?’
‘Of course you are.’ He read on to the end, singing the little song each time – ‘Tweet twee what a pretty bird am I!’ – in his cracked, true voice, glancing at her to see how she was taking it. Scotty wept away soundlessly, head between his elbow and his side, holding the sheet up to her eyes.
When the story was finished he put down the book and they lay there quietly in the bed. In the next room someone had begun to play the piano, hesitantly and with many a mistake. Madigan shifted so that his head was on her breast and she held it in her arms.
*
Ruth set off with her long, swagman’s stride that Saturday morning, through the network of streets and lanes to Dennis’s place. A heavy string bag stuffed with clothes and food was slung over her shoulder. Her head, borne well forward on her bowed neck, cut the air with a patient expression, her eyes half squinted against the breeze of her progress. She was thinking sketchily, in a mild, scattered panic, that she would soon have to start looking for another place to live.
She remembered the night she and Scotty had ridden their bikes to the empty house Scotty had found. They had pulled loose one of the louvres of the bathroom window and crammed themselves through the gap, breathless with stifled giggling and the intruder’s voluptuous desire to shit. The torch’s custardy ring of light wavered before them in the pitch-dark rooms, fleas swarmed and attacked their shins.
‘What do you reckon?’ said Scotty, standing the torch on the cement floor so that their ankles were bathed in its beam.
Ruth hesitated. ‘I dunno. Without the others . . . two’s not enough, is it?’
‘I think I might know a bloke,’ said Scotty.
Three had not been enough. Still, in the yard, sometimes a weird spasm occurred in Ruth’s nervous system which almost passed for emotion. Her spade bit and spat. Weeds gave up their grip with a rending sound. Her mop steamed gently in morning sunlight; her arms reached up with pegs and sopping cloth. Moons speckled the concrete under the nectarine tree, and bounced off the brick wall of the shed, bright as day. The sighs and protests that weather wrung from the house were to Ruth like the familiar creak of knee or wrist. She would have to drag herself out, gather herself together once more, draw the children round her like a warm but prickling blanket, and take the leap, start it all again, make what she could of bare rooms and a back yard full of dry clods.
A red car flew past Ruth where she trudged. She glanced into it and saw, like a frozen scene from a play, a Greek man driving, intent at once on the road and on his wife who was telling a story with upflung hand and merry, moving lips. A child leaned over between them from the back seat, like his father listening eagerly, rapt, mouth trembling, rea
dy to burst into laughter. They performed their happy moment for her and were gone. She stood on the corner waiting for the lights to change.
She came in the back way and found Dennis in bed at midday in his stuffy room, unconscious, though he swore later that he had merely been asleep. He was curled up on his side, his mouth agape so that the pillow was soaked with saliva in a wide ring under his cheek. The gas fire was on full blast, the window nailed shut, the blankets sodden with sweat. Ruth stepped forward in alarm to make sure he was still actually breathing. She turned the heater down to a mere hiss and opened the front door to let in a stream of sunny air. Still he did not move. She stood staring down at him, saw his blond hair all damp and sticking to his skull, his eyes tightly closed, his thick lashes, much darker than his hair, gummed together in spikes on the grey circles under his eyes. She went out into the daylight and bought a bag of oranges at the shop. When she got back he had not stirred. His boots lay where he had wrenched them off, one standing upright, the other crumpled over and drooping at the ankle. The sight of them provoked an irritable tenderness in her: she put her hand on his forehead and he rolled over suddenly on to his back. His eyes popped open and he stared blindly at her.
‘G’day.’
‘You’re not looking after yourself properly!’ she said angrily. ‘You’re sick!’
His greyish-blue eyes contracted; he looked puzzled. ‘Mouth’s all dry,’ he mumbled.
She got out her pocket knife, cut up an orange into eighths and served it to him on the folded paper bag. He did not notice that she gave him three oranges in this manner, but went on greedily sucking the slices and dropping the peels among the screwed-up tissues beside the bed. He announced his draconian cure in a voice she hardly recognised. ‘I’m gunna sweat it outa me system,’ he grunted.
‘We better forget about the Prom, then,’ said Ruth.
He did not answer, but flopped back on to the pillow and closed his eyes. Roughly she pushed his head to one side and flipped the pillow over.