When conversation lapsed I looked at his pictures. There were always several in various stages of completion, and piles of drawings. One large painting he was working on was of my head—a very large head, with narrowed watchful eyes behind the cracked pink sunglasses I usually wore, surrounded by riotous scenes of naked men, women, children and animals enjoying themselves in most possible ways. All this joyful activity went on under my cold, once-removed and possibly critical gaze. I recognised little scenes taken from our dressing-up days. And in a bottom corner, very small, a middle-aged woman mowed her lawn.
By the time our mutual boredom reached its pitch, his dependents returned. Gloria and I left father and son together and took off for the hotel in the nearest township, bouncing over the impossible little roads in a cloud of dust, swerving to avoid the worst potholes.
‘Jogging up and down in the little red wagon,’ she sang happily. ‘Jolting up and down in this rusty blue wagon,’ she laughed, one hand on the steering wheel, the other swatting wildly at some gaudy, dangerous-looking flying insect that had been sucked into the car. I trailed my hand out of the window, the air buoyant as water.
‘How was school?’ I asked politely, to get something going.
‘It was all right. Same as usual. Don’t let’s talk about that. How’s your tiny nuclear family?’
‘It’s all right. Same as usual. Don’t let’s talk about that.’
Gloria didn’t know James very well. She had been overseas during our brief haphazard courtship, and the letter I had written to her about it, care of Tasmania House in the Strand, she claimed not to have received. I had described it since: how we kept bumping into each other at parties and rebounding off into the night together for long talks. James had been the first man to explain the American electoral system clearly to me. One pretty evening, as we sat side by side on the end of a falling-down wooden jetty in the moonlight, he asked me what I had been doing when Kennedy was assassinated. For one wild moment I thought he was accusing me. He went on to say that he thought it would be one of those things that, whenever it was mentioned, people would be able to remember exactly what they had been doing at the time.
‘Like the day war broke out,’ I agreed. ‘My mother told me she gave three cheers the day war broke out, because she had this plan to lie about her age and run away from home to join the Land Army.
‘ James looked puzzled but wouldn’t be put off. He really wanted to know what I had been doing at the time. I said I couldn’t remember, so I supposed I was asleep. I was relieved that this undramatic information did not put him off. James was very interested in America.
In the course of our talks I conceived a dreadful passion for him which I went to ridiculous lengths to assuage. He finally obliged me one night on the back seat of his mother’s car in the back row of the drive-in movies where a lot of that went on. Alfie was showing at the time. Michael Caine flickered wanly across the screen suspended in the sky while James struggled wildly to free his feet which were entangled in the speaker wire. In the end he solved the problem by booting the speaker out of the car, where the actor’s adenoidal tones squawked away unheeded on the gravel. We only just got sorted out in time to be sitting respectably upright when the floodlights came on. Car doors slammed all round us as people rushed from their cars to the refreshment area underneath the screen. James nervously flicked his hair from his eyes and adjusted his clothing. Taking my hand, he carefully explained the situation to me, so that there should be no misun. derstandings later. He had a lot of girlfriends, it seemed—filter-tipped secretaries from work whom he took to Saturday-evening dinner dances at local motels. He bought them steaks at the Starline Grill, which revolved while you ate, with panoramic views of the wharves and the gothic mountain that loomed behind the town. These girls didn’t go in for drive-ins and that kind of thing, he implied.
When I found that I was pregnant and he took me home to meet his mother, it was like winning a lottery you didn’t know you had tickets in. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
So Gloria and I wouldn’t talk about that. Instead we kept our minds on higher things.
‘Those gum trees,’ I said, meaning the gum trees that lined the road, their trunks patched and stringy-looking, but graceful and pale at the same time, ‘are just like Greek columns. Like bits of a leftover civilisation.’
‘No they’re not,’ she said. ‘I bet you’ve never seen any real Greek columns.’
She knew that I hadn’t.
‘The sky,’ I ventured, ‘is a beautiful blue. If a little unnatural.’
‘Well, you do know where you are with a beautiful sky of an unnatural blue. It’s those moody grey skies that keep naturalistically changing that I don’t like.’
We sang ‘My Blue Heaven’ in harmony all the way to the hotel—well, the chorus, anyway.
In the bar it was very exciting, because we were not supposed to be there. Not that there is a law or anything, not any more. We just weren’t supposed to be there—females. It caused a lot of nudging and desert-boot shuffling in the bar. It caused painful moderations of the spoken word—a distortion of comradely language—which we liked. We liked the jukebox too. One song we would play over and over. I hoarded five-cent pieces all week for that purpose. Tammy Wynette would hit shrill notes—Stand by your man—while we rocked back and forth with the kind of giggles you can’t stop at the time but should grow out of.
We always drank brandy and dry ginger—you don’t need so much of it. We would buy a bottle and drink there, and take the rest back—plus a bottle of wine that the barman would dig out of a room at the back with the air of one discovering buried treasure.
The rides back were better than the rides there. Stops were made to admire rocky shadows, ghostly gums, the moon, the stars and the Southern Cross— but where it was I never discovered for certain; fortunately it’s on the flag. The conversation was not so good—more and more a question of semantics. Pick a word and elaborate. More and more that word would be jealousy. After various definitions made on various rides back from the hotel, I came up with a winner.
‘Why,’ I said brightly. ‘My dear, I do declare, I do believe it’s the only thing that makes your life worth living. All that excitement keeps you going.’
‘Maybe that’s right,’ was what she said.
When we got back she started to cry, quite quietly— then loudly and a lot, all over her dinner.
‘What have you been saying?’ Ben muttered at me. ‘What’s happening? What’s the matter?’
She left the table and fled bedroomwards: door shut, lock turned, dull Bette Davis sobbing. Meanwhile back at the table all was Joan Crawford stifled hysteria and grimacing.
‘What did you say to her?’
Since I couldn’t tell him what it was, or whether it had to do with me at all, I couldn’t answer. He bent my little finger back, hard. But nothing came to mind. So that was that.
This was not the usual Thursday evening behaviour. It spoilt the Thursday pattern and was the first of the signs that Thursdays were ending. It proved to be the penultimate Thursday. I blame myself.
Usually Thursday evenings were much nicer: good food accompanied by lots to drink, and faint surprise that alcohol worked as well as anything else— and let you talk at the same time.
‘I can’t get off on words,’ Ben would say. ‘Pictures are more my thing.’
Somewhere out there in the dark, the bus was always getting closer. Usually I tottered down to the gate and stood swaying as it pulled up. I could just make it up the steps and into the front seat.
If I wasn’t already hovering mothlike in the head lights, the driver would honk his horn and hang about till I appeared, which was nice of him. Perhaps he was lonely. Not once was there anyone else on the bus for the Thursday night trip back to town—just a lot of objects: bags of potatoes and pumpkins, boxes of eggs, leftover newspapers, mail sacks, things like that. I wondered whether he was lonely on other nights, or whether each night he had
a different lone passenger.
I used the homeward journey to sober up. He used it to make conversation. He told me once how, in his youth, he had been a big number-one Eddie Cochran fan. ‘You know Eddie Cochran?’
‘I’ve heard of him,’ I said, humming through a few bars of ‘Summertime Blues’ to be nice.
‘Yeah, well, you’re maybe a bit young,’ he said kindly. ‘He was killed. Went out on his motorbike. The best way there is. All over the road. He was the greatest, no question. ‘
‘Like James Dean,’ I said, anxious to please.
‘No, he was a film star. It’s not the same thing. An American film star. Jesus Christ.’
For a while he drove on in disgusted silence, making the bus hit all the ruts and ridges in the road, to teach me a lesson. Something dark, furry and forgotten scuttled along the bus, in the shadow of the seats.
Then he resumed our chat.
‘For five whole years after Eddie bought it, me and the other real fans used to hire a charabanc and go to the place where he died and put flowers on the road. We’d have a motorcycle escort out in front. In black leather gear like Eddie wore. Those were the days, like they say. The good old days is right. It’s all changed now. The whole country’s gone down a lot. No sense of direction. To think, we used to lead the world.’ He sighed regretfully, squashing a headlight-dazzled possum under the nearside front wheel. ‘That’s why I’ve come out here. It’s the country of the future, no question.’
‘Oh, for sure.’
On the night of the sad domestic drama, he unexpectedly ground to a stop with a crash of gears and a scream of static from his transistor. He switched it off. Eerie night noises started up in the bush.
‘How about it then?’
‘What?’
‘How about it then?’
‘How about what then?’
‘How about that then? You know.’ He gestured with his greasy head towards the long back seat of the bus, leering prettily. ‘No one ever comes along here, this time of night. Or I could pull off the road behind them trees, if you’d rather.’
I don’t remember it clearly. A lot of free-range eggs didn’t make it to the breakfast table that morning. I was covered with chicken feathers, egg yolk and news print when I got back to town. I tried to get some of it off in the taxi going home. I didn’t attempt the news print. most of it was it was in places that didn’t show.
I always took a taxi home from the rank opposite the GPO, it being too late for a bus. I left the cab at the top of the road and tiptoed down to collect Angelica. I could never tiptoe enough, though. The voice usually sprang out of the darkness just as my cautious toes left the top step and my anxious fingers curled round the fly-screen door. The bloody thing squeaked.
‘Did you have a good day, my dear?’
‘Yes, thank you. Did you? Was she good?’
‘Oh, of course she was good, the little darling. We had a lovely time. We went to the beach this afternoon. I do so love to show the pretty little thing off.’
‘Oh good. I’m glad everything was all right.’
‘James came round. Well, he was hungry and I expect the poor boy was a bit lonely. He had dinner here with me and we watched television together—I did enjoy that. He left a couple of hours ago. He must be wondering what’s happened to you, my dear.’
‘He does it on purpose,’ I confided to the baby as we trailed homewards. She slept peacefully on, as did her father until we reached home. He awoke the second the fly-screen door squeaked.
‘Like mother, like son,’ I told the baby. She smiled sweetly in her sleep. I wheeled her into her room and left her in the pram rather than risk waking her by lifting her out into her bassinet. As soon as the motion of the pram stopped she whimpered. I flipped her over on to her tummy, kissed the furry back of her head and turned to do my tiptoeing act out of the room. Daddy stood smiling sleepily in the doorway. He looked fuzzy at the edges, dark brown with sleep.
‘I’ve got to oil that bloody fly-wire door,’ he said. ‘Remind me. I’ll try and do it tomorrow. Might as well go round and do Mum’s at the same time. Have a go at that bloody pram too, while I’m at it.’
‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you bring Angelica back with you from your mother’s tonight?’
‘Well, I knew you’d be going there anyway. You weren’t expecting me to collect her, were you? Although you know I would, don’t you? I don’t mind. Any time. You’ve only got to ask.’
He stepped aside so that I could pass by him out of Angelica’s room. He was big and soft, with lots of shiny dark brown hair. His eyes and mouth filled his face; both were much too big for aesthetic balance.
He seemed fascinated by something on the floor. ‘Your feet are filthy,’ he murmured.
I took a shower. And so to bed.
When James was back asleep I unravelled myself and got up. The chance to go forth babyless to the beach was too good to miss. Husband, wife and child asleep under one roof seemed one person too many: security goes in twos.
Approaching the rise in the road I saw that the sky behind it had a peculiar back-lit orange quality, like the setting for some show that was about to start. It was the dawn, and I reached the beach in time to see it. I tried to ignore it. Dawns are too theatrical for me, and this one looked particularly stage-managed, with every conceivable overdone effect. After the sun had squeezed its way out of the invisible slit between the sea and sky, the water flushed momentarily red, as if covered with a slick of afterbirth. Later, when it settled down, the light was violet-coloured, and the sea and sky glowed gently like the inside of an oyster shell when wet. The air was clean and fresh, like your mouth after toothpaste. A new start.
Someone had put up a swing. It stood there at the top of the scraggy-grassed slope to the beach, with its dark institutional-green tubular iron frame, bright new chains and plain wooden seat. It was a well-made and official-looking swing, clearly the work of the local authority. I stared at it. Small pains started in my head, one behind each ear: anger and guilt. ‘Take my eyes off you for one day,’ I screamed at the beach, ‘and look what happens.’ My voice shrilled high and horrible, running along in both directions and bouncing back off the end rocks in stereophonic fury. The sound met in the middle of my head, and the pain overwhelmed me. I had to sit down, and so I sat on the swing. Back it went, then forward, a seductive swing. My toes, reverting instinctively to childhood, kicked hard into the dust and met the ground at just the right place in the swing’s backward arc to make it swing the more. The seat warmed against my skin. I pulled up my skirt and snuggled my bottom against the smooth grainy wood, wrapping my hand in the chains and hanging by the wrists in a rush of air. I closed my eyes; my head fell back. I recognised the signs. Swing rape. Desperate to get away I tore my wrists free and jumped. My knees were grazed, my legs cut by the coarse grass. My wrists were scraped and bruised from the chains. They hurt badly as circulation returned, and blood formed little bead bracelets round my ankles, where the grass had wrapped and cut. Sitting down in the dust, propped up against one iron leg of the swing, I watched as each little blood bead grew until it became too distended to contain itself. One by one the beads overflowed and trickled down, tiny red ribbons round a maypole. I picked up a sharp-edged stone, which looked useful—a tool: a long-dead Aboriginal hunter’s weapon. I jabbed its sharp point into the swing’s leg, but nothing happened. The paint was too thick, all its molecules bound tightly together, impervious and permanent. I turned my weapon on its side, and scraped down hard on the paint. A curl of colour came onto the stone. I scraped down hard again. A thin layer of the swing’s paint skin clung onto my stone. Again and again I scraped down, my teeth grinding with effort. Layer on layer of paint came away. The paint on my stone was thicker than the paint on the swing. The steel bone lay exposed—just a small piece. I rubbed the exposed area with my finger. It glittered faintly. The sunlight was getting stronger. Tiny flecks of green paint clung on my sweaty fingers. I picked each
green morsel off with the point of my tongue, and it tasted bitter and dangerous. Lead poisoning. I recalled sad old newspaper tales of dead infants still and cold in their playpens, mouths smeared with colour from lead-painted toys, and I tried to spit it out, but couldn’t. Paint is persistent: it does its job and clings to surfaces to which it is applied. Why worry? I had just decided to have a go at another leg of the swing when a dog barked close by. A man and dog walked along the shore, and I straightened up from my kneeling position beside the swing. My legs were a streaky mess of blood, sweat and dust. Man and dog turned and came towards me up the beach. I shielded the wounded swing with my body. My fingers closed around the stone.
‘Are you all right, miss?’ His first words of the day, they seemed, rumbling up from his sleep-stilled stomach. ‘Has there been an accident?’ He blinked around the deserted, still misty, horizon, as if looking for a possible cause. Under my astonished gaze the mists rolled back, revealing an entire invasion fleet of warships, with guns pointed at the defenceless shore. Just as quickly they vanished. The scene played on. I suddenly felt very tired.
‘No, not really. I fell off the swing. Silly thing to do. I never could resist a swing.’ I tried convincing him with a matching silly-girl smile. My face was too tired to make the effort. I glared at him instead. He glared back and walked on.
I put the stone in my pocket and walked down to the water. The sand was starting to warm; individual gritty crystals glinted slyly between my toes. I walked into the sea up to my knees, and the cold saltiness of it stung antiseptically in all the tiny weals and cuts. I scooped it up it against my face until I became calm and composed. Time to go home. Lines of glistening white shells edged the shoreline in a frothy lace cuff. I picked up a handful and put them in my pocket with the stone. The sand felt hotter under my sea-chilled feet as I walked up the beach; the day was beginning. The dog ran back towards me, a shaggy black cannon ball which swelled as it got closer and rushed past me and up the slope to the swing. Skidding to a stop, it lifted its leg and pissed all over my handiwork. At least the dog had noticed.
Blue Skies Page 4