Later, when the noon blaze subsided, the local women came down. Those nearest would walk laden with bright beach bags and babies, carting the many necessities for enjoying an hour in the open. Those from further up the road would drive, the wheels of their small economical second cars spurting up dust sprays and rutting the sand at the edge. Most people gathered together towards the ends of the beach. The hitherto mysterious rocks were then pressed into domestic service, their flat tops used as tables, their crevices as storage spaces for cold drinks and for keeping bits of clothing out of the sand.
As older children escaped from school they joined their families on the beach. The sand was dug up and shaped into castles, giant initials, holes through to China. The murmurings of mothers and sun-stoned babies were overpowered by shrill competitive shrieks, the sounds of unwinding that followed release from school. Mothers and babies gathered their things together and left. There were evening meals to be cooked for returning husbands, sprinklers to be switched on, clothes to be taken down from the rotary hoists standing in back yards—suburbia’s garlanded totems. The older children lingered on, following their own patterns, guarding their freedom until their mothers’ warning cries arose in the dusk and drove them back indoors.
My boredom grew up in the midst of plenty— plenty of people. I even had one right inside me: it kicked from time to time to remind me of its presence. Built-in company.
But you don’t think of it like that, or do you? I put the point to my gynaecologist.
‘Do you?’ Oh God, he was handsome, especially when he smiled.
He smiled.
‘Well, no. That is an unusual way of putting it. I find that most women see no further than the unquestionably important business of getting the baby born. The future is hidden from them as if by a curtain.’
‘Or a venetian blind,’ I suggested, thinking the answer didn’t go with the question.
‘If you like.’ Another smile, but his heart wasn’t in it this time, you could tell.
The baby was born just in time for me to spend my first day home from the hospital watching the new neighbour finally move in. I parted the blinds and peeped out, wondering, with the rest of the street, at the width of her television screen, the simulated-leather dimen.sions of her three-piece suite, her cocktail cabinet, her funny-looking lawnmower.
Next morning she spoke to me. There was no avoiding her. She was out of the house, dragging the mower behind her, and had me bailed up before I could move.
‘Gooday,’ she said. ‘I’m your new neighbour. Olive’s the name, but call me Ollie. Always start as you mean to go on, that’s what I say.’
I said I was pleased to meet her.
‘Mutual, I’m sure. Lived here long, have you? I’m a stranger in these parts myself. I’ve come over from the mainland to give it a go in Tassie. Been here before on holidays, of course, me and my late husband. That’s when we got the idea.’
She was polishing the lawnmower, unwinding a long flex which she plugged in just inside her sunshine-yellow front door. The machine howled into action, hauling her across the grass in its wake.
She shrilled back at me over her shoulder. ‘Isn’t this a little beaut? Bet you’ve never seen one of these before, have you?’
She was right. The electric lawnmower had yet to make its mark on the Apple Isle. She finished her demonstration with a flourishing figure-of-eight round my feet and switched off.
‘Not bad, eh?’
I agreed. Secretly I thought it dangerous. I wasn’t the only one. People were always leaning over the fence and handing out advice. I did so myself on the bad days when any diversion would do.
She assured us all—her well-meaning neigh.bours. that she knew the dangers: ‘Youse have just got to be very careful to see that nothing is on the grass, like a stone or twig or something. It could fly up into the machinery and make an electric shock.’ So before she started she always combed the pathetic patch of sun-scorched stubble with a rake she kept just for the purpose.
She mowed the lawn several times a week, and it didn’t get a chance to grow. From the time she spent on it, I think she was probably as bored as I was. Maybe we could have discussed it and filled our time taking flower-arranging courses or something.
Instead I stayed behind my dusty blinds, occasionally parting two plastic slats to watch her work.
‘It’s the same the whole world over,’ I crooned, watching my breath cloud the window glass and wondering if it really was.
My neighbour, who had more sense, toiled mercilessly on. I concluded that for her it was an obsession: a contest with nature, an epic struggle or something of the sort.
In the weeks that followed I felt it my duty to take my daughter out each day for an airing. We went down to the beach to join our peers. I listened carefully while my fellow mothers talked of this and that. The baby wriggled in her wicker basket, protected from the sun by the useful shadow of a rock. I joined in where I could, politely voicing carefully considered comments rehearsed in advance. The conversational topics were raised in a circular way, one for each weekday as it came round in its turn. Mostly I eavesdropped and felt superior as they chattered of knitting patterns and incest: scarcely a day passed without talk of some hopelessly deranged mutant being found chained to the wall with the family dog outside some inland shack, an irredeemable mess of genes—and all because its parents didn’t get about much. Back in town, the Country Women’s Association Choral Society was preparing for the fiftieth annual Gilbert and Sullivan Festival.
The image in my mind of the poor stranded turtle was replaced by one of a seal colony, the mothers and the babies huddled together in steaming heaps on the beach, father away providing.
When the seal imagery wore thin I conjured up another. The hopeful, shiny pumpkin face of King Kong appeared on that line between sea and sky. Enormous arms stretched towards us from the horizon, hairy hands across the sea. King Kong picked up the women between thumb and forefinger, gathering them in the palm of his hand. The hand sank back into the sea, holding them in a gently bubbling bouquet beneath the waves. Only I remained, alone on the beach. When the bubbles subsided he let them go, and they sank gracefully, turning long watery somersaults down to the sea bed. His pumpkin face shone down on me; his wrinkled leather slits of eyes twinkled happily; his fist closed about my waist. He raised me up, penetrating me with his pointy hairy little finger until I disappeared into the clouds, borne heavenwards on a rising chorus of cries from the abandoned babies.
I stopped going to the beach.
I concentrated my efforts not on airing the baby but on abandoning it. By being polite and behaving well, I could buy myself bits of free time. The person I had mostly to be nice to was my husband’s mother. This was because she lived at pram-pushable distance and loved looking after the baby. Not every day: that wouldn’t have been right. But she was good for two days a week.
Tuesdays and Thursdays. On these days I could take off and forget the street, the beach and three o’clock in the afternoon.
I chose not to forget my neighbour. Her obsession interested me. I made up stories about her, so that my friends would also be interested. Between us we built up quite a saga around Our Lady of the Lawn.
I had two friends. One for each day. Both men. Finding accessible men during the day was difficult. It seemed that proper men worked nine-to-five, with a gap of an hour in the middle, and you can’t do much in an hour. At least I can’t.
Ben was a painter, but he also did photographs and drawings. He was for Thursday, saving best for last. He was married to Gloria, my oldest friend.
The necessity for a bit of pulse-racing secrecy did a lot for me. Ben became exciting. He made a nice change. I remembered Gloria’s own excitement when she first met him. It was in the park near the art school he attended and the teacher’s college where she was training. She had been sitting on a bench eating her packed lunch, and Ben had come along and sat down at the other end. Noticing his hungry look and empt
y tucker box, she had offered him one of her landlady’s home-made sponge fingers.
‘He’s different,’ she told me. ‘He’s got this flat in one of those houses behind the college. His bedroom is lined with silver foil like a tea chest.’ Gloria had all the luck in those days.
Jonathan was Tuesday. He managed a restau.rant. which those who knew about such things thought the best on the island. I had worked as a waitress there, nights and weekends. We became friendly the day Jonathan took me to one side and let me in on a secret. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Everyone can see through your dress when you stand in front of the light. It’s transparent,’ he added, faintly unnecessarily.
‘I know,’ I said.
‘Oh well, that’s all right then.’ He looked relieved to hear it.
We took to drinking together after hours in the empty bar. The bar was the best thing about the place. The restaurant lacked atmosphere—candles in bottles or no candles in bottles. But the bar was nice. It had a marble top and bottle-filled glass shelves fixed high on the wall behind it.
Next to the bar was an enormous black refrigerator, the first I had seen, in which ice and cold drinks were kept. I admired this exotic refrigerator, even though it showed fingermarks terribly; few people could resist touching it lightly with their fingertips as they passed. You could just see your face in it, if you looked hard enough.
The next best thing about the restaurant was that it was underground. Once down the stairs from the street you were safe. As you sat in the bar, with its dim light and many dull shining surfaces, time passed quickly and unnoticed.
Jonathan went with the restaurant, as much a fixture as the black refrigerator. He had come to Australia to spend his old age—as he was fond of saying—in the sun. He was moon-faced and pale, and rarely seen above ground in daylight; his grey hair grew in marcel waves down past his collar: he didn’t blend with natural surroundings. Small boys would follow him down the street chanting ‘What d’yer use on it then, mate—Curly Pet?’ and he would hurry away from them on his out-turned feet, his pursed mouth and mincing walk laying him open to charges of ‘pouffery’, the Australian crime against the sanctity of mateship.
Jonathan claimed to be an ex-British Army Captain and had a repertoire of adventures. From the background of these tales it seemed he had lived through the Indian Mutiny, but nobody took him up on the details, because they were good stories.
He claimed friendship with the beautiful people who lived overseas, a hard claim to disprove because so few turned up in Tiny Town. Those who did appear, usually in some professional endeavour aimed at entertaining the locals in return for their money, always came to his restaurant. When they turned up to feed, Jonathan was pleased. He drew a chair to their table and recommended dishes, and this often annoyed the cook, who had other menus planned. Undeterred, he would scurry off to the kitchen and prepare the food himself, causing confusion and resentment among his kitchen staff. He would often ponder the causes of his high staff turnover, putting it down to the aggressive streak he detected in all his new countrymen. To support his efforts he always gave the visitors free bottles of a wine he kept for just such occasions. Like all the wines he served, it was Australian. He considered this one special, and seemed to imply to any eavesdropping natives that it was surprising that an Australian wine should be so good.
This made him something of a marked man, but he remained unaware of that.
On these occasions he could never resist joining the party: he would sit quiet and content for a time, basking in the reflected glory and the conversation, which was a cut above what he usually suffered.
Sooner or later he would start to bloom like some forward, pale-faced flower. He would take over the conversation. Mainly by telling jokes. Funny jokes. All types of jokes—finally downright repetitious and boring jokes.
Enchantment faded. Moves were made to be getting on, pleasant though it had all been, pleased though they were to make his acquaintance, and they would certainly recommend the place to all their friends. These moves would be blocked by offers of one more bottle, more cheese, more coffee, more anything. This was usually late at night. The absence of staff may have deterred the guests from taking up his generous offers.
In the long gaps of time between the visits of these romantic strangers, he had to make do with the local crowd. They flocked in in droves. They were not as glamorous, it is true, but they were reliable, especially the lunch-time lot, who consisted mostly of local celebrities. some exciting television comperes from the two Hobart stations, some journalists, one of whom was said once to have written for mainland dailies.
A separate group was made up of the local arts-and-crafts men, who comprised a large part of the local population. In the long summer days, if the wind was in the right direction, the sounds of potters potting and weavers weaving rose to a disturbing crescendo. At night, unable to sleep, I would try to calm myself by lying still and counting relentless rows of pleasant little greyish-brown mugs and other bits of improving pottery jumping over fences.
It was Jonathan who diagnosed the complaint that we both suffered from, and I was surprised at what he had to say. Drunk or not at the time, he showed me a remarkable contrast to his usually insensitive exterior. There he stood, revealed and psychologically naked in that greasy neon-lit kitchen, his fingers stuck deep in a glass bowl of prawn cocktail. We were hiding in the kitchen, afraid to go outside because we feared that a drunk rugby team was waiting to bash us up. Jonathan said that if they didn’t clear off soon he was going to call the police. Meanwhile we waited, eating up everything that wasn’t likely to last through till Monday.
‘You know, old girl,’ he said, ‘the trouble is that I am so piss-awful scared of people. They terrify me, especially when they gang together in groups. I suspect you feel the same way.’
I didn’t say so. Obviously a whole bar-full of over excited athletes, convinced that he was homosexual and determined to put him right with a thumping, had unsettled his nerve.
‘I don’t just mean that lot upstairs,’ he went on. ‘They’re much too obvious a manifestation of the syndrome. The really frightening ones are the people who cluster together in the so-called better type of suburb. The golf club joiners, those who keep other people out, who want them in their proper place in this so-called classless society, who like to have a good laugh at anything unusual, who are terrified of anything new and different—the worshippers of the great pepper-grinder god. I’m not putting it well. Never mind. Forget it. Silly to talk like this.’
It wasn’t that silly. I thought of the women on the beach. I felt the same way. Perhaps I was scared of them— it seemed better to be scared than to be stuck up.
Before I left Jonathan’s employ in a premature panic at finding myself pregnant, it was arranged that we should stay friends. Tuesday seemed a good day for it. I would go up to town and see him on Tuesdays.
Usually we would have lunch at his own corner table near the kitchen, so that he could go in there and fuss through the busy times without too much inconvenience. Lunch was always exciting; and I always drank a lot, and talked too much; he rarely listened.
Afterwards, after locking up, I would go back with him to his flat. While he slept in preparation for the night’s excitements, I roamed around playing his records and tapes and soaking up the atmosphere. He was the first person I knew who had headphones, which were a bit unnecessary since his flat was above a warehouse.
The pink-and-grey vinyl radiogram with gold knobs that my parents gave me for my seventeenth birthday was never the same again, and I put it in the carport, along with other unwanted items. The carport slowly filled up with rubbish. Wedding presents went in first and on top of them piles of newspapers, magazines and worn-out obscene publications smuggled in from foreign parts; broken things that may have been mendable; large amounts of just plain garbage that I was ashamed to put out for our irate garbage-disposal men who grudgingly crawled round once a week at 2 a.m. or thereabouts. They wou
ldn’t take cartons of rubbish, only two neat deodorised plastic garbage cans per house.
I fretted over where people put their excess rubbish. Surely they must have some. Probably a great deal went onto compost heaps and incinerators in back gardens, but both seemed mysterious and faintly dangerous to me. So all that shameful excess went into the garage. After a while I gave up packing it in cartons, and just opened the door enough to get my arm round to hurl the old tin cans and bottles inside as far as I could.
After some months of this I noticed, to my horror, that the double doors were beginning to bulge outwards. Terrified of exposure, I piled bricks in front and tried to forget all about it. On the hot days I thought I could detect a faint but sickly smell, and local dogs took to sniffing round the doors and moaning ecstatically. I became nervous and imagined germs and rats breeding out there: I saw the rats pouring forth in a seething stream to bite the sun-brown babies in their prams.
In the pink pages I found a refuse-disposal firm. They agreed to come and solve my problem, even though I wasn’t an industrial unit—more a health hazard. Two men worked all day with shovels removing layer after layer. The further down they went, the more compacted and unpleasant it became. As I sneaked an occasional look, it seemed to me like the geological layers that are exposed in a cliff by erosion: thousands of years squashed into a one-inch stratum. Finally they scraped the remains of the wedding presents up from the concrete floor and drove the lot away in a truck. The pink-and-grey vinyl-finish radiogram with gold-plated knobs and luminous station-finder dial lay on the floor beside the driver. I was glad it had found a good home. For twenty dollars I had bought peace of mind and a sense of virtue. I just hoped nobody would find out.
I might have saved myself some embarrassment if I’d had them call on a Thursday. Thursdays I was out. Thursdays always started bright, and they always started early. Bright and early, there I’d be, pushing the pram up the road, round the corner and down the next road but one.
Blue Skies Page 2