We got in, and I found a piece of paper. Maybe a writer had lived there, or the son of a writer, or a promising young Australian writer, aged fifty.
It said,
“I try to make use of the world
but
you can never use it to the full.
Hardly even grasp it.
You have to let it flash by
made up of innumerable moments
and later try to recall one.
What about the world
when you’re not looking
and the parts we’ve
missed?
It’s hopeless trying
to do more than attend
to a few single moments.”
The ash-pickers of the future, when they come across bits of paper like that, may find out where we went wrong.
I put it in my sleeve, took it home and buried it in an old cigar tin, a thin flat one, at the corner of the house, the corner where no drain pipes come down. I put a stone on it. It was a time capsule.
Looking west from our place were blue mountains and their cliffs of air that I had seen from the car. It was a windy day, above us were windblown, threadbare clouds, and the wind beneath those clouds was green. In a hundred years would there still be such things, and a girl of nine watching? A girl like me?
When Men Were Working in the Street
When men were working in the street digging deep trenches for the sewerage, they used to speak to us kids as we passed to and from school. They were rough-looking, much more rough than any of the men round about when they changed into their weekend clothes to do the grass. Much rougher. Their hairy legs were hairier, their backs browner, they had tattoos. One had tattoos all down his back and front and arms and on the tops of his legs.
I used to wonder if he had them under his shorts. Shorts was all he wore when the sun was out.
“You got a big sister, kid?” they’d call out.
The second day I said “Yes.” I’d love to have had a big sister. Sometimes, anyway.
“What’s she like?” said one.
“Has she got good legs?”
“Big boobs?” said one, drawing curves with his hands. “And a shape like this?”
“Better than that,” I said, and shook my head.
“Does she have a suntan?”
“Yes.”
“Where does it stop? Do you see her in the shower? Does she sunbake out in the yard?”
“Yes, on the edge of the pool.” That was naughty. We didn’t have a pool; my father wouldn’t have one no matter how I pleaded.
“Does the tan stop here?” the man said, putting a finger below his navel.
“It goes all over,” I said, realizing I’d most likely be trapped on specifics if I was trapped at all.
“Can I come and wash her back in the bath?” an older one said.
“No, but that one can,” I said, pointing to a handsome young one that hadn’t said anything.
Those men were a different species from my father. They really fitted doing the work they did, standing in the bottom of trenches, working big yellow machines and graders. Maybe they had to be different, to do that work. Maybe their difference had sorted them out into that trench.
“Have you got a brother too?” said a big fierce man.
“Yes.”
“What’s he like?” said the same man.
“Like him,” I said, pointing to the one I liked.
They all whistled, except my favorite. I think he was blushing, but I couldn’t be sure. One of them tipped him under the chin and called him a name. It sounded like Linda.
As I passed the Goughs’ house I heard Robert Gough doing his piano practice. He was playing a Beethoven sonatina, and the notes came clearly to me. I stopped to listen, it sounded so clever. Not a wrong note. I wished I could play better than Robert Gough.
Mister Ackhurst’s Fragmentation
It wasn’t really leprosy, it didn’t affect the way people bought their fruit and their vegetables.
“It’s noncontagious,” he told the locals who still bought from his corner shop despite the few extra cents on everything.
And it wasn’t real leprosy. It was just that bits fell off.
“No germs,” he said cheerfully, as a new customer eyed his hands. He still had the index finger of his right hand and the middle finger of his left. He also had most of his right ear and almost all his nose.
The bits that fell off didn’t cause bleeding, and that was what caused him to run the gauntlet of the hospital, knowing he might be kept there if they ran tests that kept him out of the shop, but at the same time having an appreciation of the fact that there might really be something tragically wrong with him.
The bits that fell off—they fell apart too. Not that many bits had fallen off and much of the time it was when he was in bed. When the lobe of his left ear parted company with the rest, it was in the shop and three customers saw it. Luckily, it fell to pieces quickly on the floor, and he was able to stamp on it and grind the powdered ear into the rest of the dust and the cracks in the timber floor before the customers had a chance to complain.
His name was up on the side of the building; in the old times he owned the whole block of four shops—chemist, fruit shop, milk bar and barber’s. The paint had faded and rain had washed most of it off, but the name could still be made out. I used to wonder if it would all be gone at the same time as Mister Ackhurst’s last bits disintegrated.
Aspects of Family Life
Mother kept her eyes on her plate. She ate a lot and always praised father’s cooking lavishly. When she went to put sugar in her tea she seemed fascinated by the sharp white crystals, and I wondered if she would ever let them drop in. She took milk, too: her tea had to look like a lightly muddy river.
She made a lot of noise eating, and was the only woman I know that broke wind unself-consciously, like a man.
If she suddenly ate something and no one else was eating, she’d turn and look at you. You got the full blast of the sound, and you knew she was looking straight at you. It was a funny feeling.
Every time, every single time I looked up at her when she did that, she said, “I love you.” In a most accusing way. “But I love you,” as if after impressing that on you she ought to be able to do what she liked. It didn’t even sound sincere.
“You love everything, Mother,” I said with all the knowledge of nine years on the planet.
She looked at me as if I’d tried to hurt her, then wrote the whole thing down. I think she did: I’m not sure. At least she doesn’t shout—she never shouts—or slobber on the floor.
Father had come home from dying on stage and seemed pleased to be cooking. In the colder months he was beginning to get a stiffness down one side. Sometimes he said it was arthritis, sometimes he said it was nothing. Cooking warmed him up after the day’s work.
“I love chicken,” she said, apparently to tease me. Her mouth dripped with oil and one white piece of chicken flesh stuck out of one corner of her mouth. Her lips sucked at the leg of the bird, the flesh slipped clean off the bird’s bone like a sock, and she laid the leg bone delicately down at the side of her plate. I was amazed.
She took her partial denture out. “I like the butter and oil washing over me gums,” she said.
“Through the lips and round the gums,
Look out stomach, here it comes!” said father cheerfully.
What had got into mother? She wasn’t supposed to make jokes. Was it possible I did not correctly assess the mental life of my own parents?
Sometimes I wish she would sit silent; brood, remember. But she is ceaselessly active. She is invulnerable. Nothing can scratch the surface of her soul.
Today I found a piece of paper with these lines on it in handwriting that looked like mother’s, but more vigorous. Perhaps she was younger then.
My life was closed before its end
When neither I could see;
I wandered in a foolish land
&
nbsp; Beside a ghostly sea.
All memories my mind commands
I give the vagrant breeze;
Few things are treacherous as sands
Beside imagined seas.
I kept it so I could try to understand it, but I kept it so long that I felt guilty about giving it back. Then I just forgot. What had happened to her when she was young? I would wait and ask her when I was older.
I Worried
I worried about my mother and father.
She was undoubtedly mad.
Equally surely, she was full of love for my father, since she kept saying so.
Here was my problem:
Was the expression of love from my mother—if she was mad—as valuable as if it came from some other person whose worth and sanity could be seen by all?
If it was worth anything, was it worth what it was because of her? Or as existing in its own right as love?
If it was worth nothing, did that matter? Did love, any love, exist in itself and for itself, as light blessing a dark place? Was it a stray fruit of the earth, the earth or loam of the human mass, that poked up out of its human humus, to bloom and live a while and die like anything else, with no more justification than a flower on a mountain ledge never seen by any eye that knew it as a flower?
Why did I think of worth? Perhaps the problem was in me.
I worried about my father and mother and about me, and like most problems, it went round and round, like a merry-go-round. You could get off at one place, then get on again and off at another place, but it still went round and didn’t go away.
The Life-Sharpener
The life-sharpener had his stall set up in the shoppingtown. Father took me in on a late shopping night simply to see the people and what went on. Being at school we knew very little of what the people did who had got out of the childhood machine.
There were about forty people meditating in a half circle round him.
“The diminishing point; the mass, the position which decreases until the mind, in following it, is left suspended on nothing; follow it into nothingness, allow your mind to play, to dance on nothing, to be independent, dependent on nothing; a floating self sensitive to the least touch of the Eternal.”
The meditators solemnly, with eyes closed, concentrated to purge their minds, diminish their consciousness, and all the while the shoppers hurried or lounged around, feet shuffling, babies and children crying and yelling, sucking lollies, being slapped mercilessly by women dying to get a look at the goodies in the shops, dying to be rid of the kids.
My father was watching me.
“It works,” he said.
“How?” I asked.
“If they believe and make an effort, they will contact something, whatever it is. Even if it’s their own brains talking back to them when they’re in a receptive state, ready to be obedient, they’re sure to hear something that will help them.”
“All of them?”
“A few. A few,” he amended judiciously.
Somehow the sight of those people ignoring all else round them annoyed me; I wanted to go and shake them, I wanted to pull their gaze away from themselves on to the world of objects round them. I daresay I wanted to be a tyrant and tell them exactly what they should do.
On the way home we passed school, where the two pruned and leafless plane trees lifted their knobby fists; whether at the sky or at each other, I could not tell.
On the Geography Table
On the geography table there was a relief map of the country built up from clay and plasticine; it showed the great mountain range that cut the coastal fringe from the interior, on the east. It showed rivers, and all the other ranges. I kept looking at it after 4W had gone out to playlunch.
I was fascinated by the flat middle of the country, and without quite thinking what I was doing I lifted the bottle of water from the nearby nature table and let it spill on to the flat and arid center of Australia, where it spread and formed a pool. I hadn’t noticed, but the bottle had in it the tadpoles collected by Stewart Regan and his mates; they swam painfully around and wriggled in the very shallow lake I had made. I say shallow and it was, but the size of it! Again without thinking too much of it I got up some of the water with the mouth of the empty clay jar and my lake shrank to the size of a rather fatter Lake Baikal, which we’d had in geography last week when someone asked which was the largest freshwater lake in the world.
A teacher saw me from one of the windows on to the corridor, and I was sent to the headmaster for a talking-to.
When I told father he said, “That was a great fuss just for putting water into the dead heart, darling.”
I had to stand in front of the class and tell what I’d done and apologize and explain why what I’d done was wrong.
I had to make it all up. I couldn’t see why it was so wrong. But I did it well: I was a fair liar and a natural hypocrite.
I Was Dying to Play With the Boys
One day in the vacant block of land I picked up the long iron bar the boys were using to show their strength—they tossed it two-handed over their shoulders—and hurled it like a javelin. The tip hit a boulder, slid off, the shaft of the javelin came down on the rock and the whole thing bounced up and forward and took a paling off the fence of the next house.
The boys tried to protect me in their fashion, from the opprobrium my action attracted, by insisting I did it. I confessed readily, and wasn’t believed. The boys’ parents were complained to and wanted to believe the boys did it and I couldn’t have.
I kept owning up. The boys got sick of me.
“We’d be better off taking the belting than with her following us around,” I heard them say.
They took the belting. I waited for them after school next day but they went the long way round. I went home and lay in the hammock and looked up at the few clouds stitched in place high up in the blue. Over toward the horizon were white cloud-towers, and behind them ice-mountains of cloud. I fancied I could feel the world turning.
I went inside and practiced Clementi, glumly.
Be Merry, My Friends
When we heard that Mister Randall was to come to live in Dalton Walk it was news. Up to then the oldest man in the district after Mister Scully went was Mister Bell, and he went jogging every morning. The oldest lady was Mrs. Kentwell, and she still played tennis and worked on the stalls at the church, the tuckshop at school, and gave out leaflets at the schoolgate on election days. Practically everyone else was young, and kids didn’t like them.
Mister Randall was really old. He just sat there, but that was what we wanted. Every time we went round, if it was a nice day, we knew he’d be sitting out front. That’s if we got there before five o’clock.
The day he came, fourteen of the kids in my class turned out in cars and on foot to see him. I took round a plate of scones, father wouldn’t let me take anything more than that, he said they might think we thought they were poor.
Apart from my class, there were kids from all the other classes in the school. The lady, Mrs. Sheedy, came out and didn’t know what to do. She asked us not to make a noise or he would have to go in, so we just hung over the fence and watched him. Dead still and silent. He didn’t seem to mind.
Griselda Cadbury broke the silence. She would.
“Are you very old, Mister Randall?”
“Not as old as I will be,” he said with a nod of his head.
“Can you get out of that chair?” asked a boy from fourth class.
“Watch,” said Mister Randall. And he got up and went over to the flower beds with the Shasta daisies and lupins and Lilliput zinnias and bent down and began to weed them of very small green weeds. You’d hardly bother. He bothered.
The lady came out after about ten minutes and said it was nice of us to call, and she couldn’t ask us all in, but perhaps we could come a few at a time in future. There were cakes, scones, fruit, and parcels wrapped up so you couldn’t see what people had brought him. Mrs. Sheedy picked them up. She was s
miling at first, but by the time she turned to go back into the house she was crying. But not making a crying noise. Just tears.
Of the inhabitants round about, some were pros; none harmed them, just as the previous “rich” lived here and there, unmolested among the poor.
Whenever you see the hearse go by,
And think to yourself that you’re going to die
Be merry, my friends, be merry.
We never said that poem in Dalton Walk, only where it didn’t really matter.
A Natural
At nine, in fourth class, Everett Vaux had an unexpected dividend from his disability. He’d always had to keep on the move, since his toes wanted to take root and grow and to get out of holding the markers for the half-kilometer run as he did in previous years for the older boys, he went in the race himself. He wasn’t strictly allowed to be in it, it was only for fifth and sixth class boys, but he made a fuss at the start and shouted about his roots and he’d be growing if he didn’t do something quickly, and the teacher in charge, more concerned to be seen to be not having a fuss at his end of things, hissed at him, “OK, you little bastard, run and be buggared.” They were free with their abuse at Church Hill Public.
He ran out in front of the other eighteen inside the first thirty meters and had fifty meters on the field at the end of the first lap. He didn’t slow as much as a meter but kept on running easily and pulled up without breathing hard, a hundred meters ahead of the next boy. The school had found a runner, and immediately entered him in the zone athletics carnival.
He was left to walk away alone. No one congratulated him. He’d always been different.
A Woman of the Future Page 13