LIZ: What girl—woman?
GAZ: Carol.
LIZ: Carol?
GAZ: From the accident. The inquest. She’s a librarian. I didn’t know what else to do. [Pause.] I’ve been pretty upset. [Pause.] And Carol could see that. [Pause.] And she was upset too.
LIZ: You were both upset.
GAZ: That’s right.
LIZ: Now we’re all upset.
GAZ: I worry about her. It’s been worse for her than it has for me. She doesn’t sleep well. I think she broods. I think she’s looking for a major life change.
LIZ: And you’re it?
GAZ: I’ve been trying to do the right thing by everybody, and that’s the whole problem—it’s not possible. No matter what you do, you end up exploiting women, because there doesn’t seem to be any way not to! [Pause.] But at least I had a real response to my own need. And to somebody else’s need. [He scratches.] So what happens now? Do I go the way of television, newspapers and mirrors? [Pause.] I’ve been having an affair, that’s all. If I hadn’t gone and blurted it out, nothing would have changed. [Pause.] I never meant to tell you. It simply came out. I don’t know why. I feel like somebody up there’s dangling me on a string and watching me dance.
LIZ: Who’s dangling you on a string? Carol?
GAZ: Not Carol.
LIZ: Somebody up where?
GAZ: Never mind… It’s too weird… [Scratching] Carol’s given me a pretty perverted view of the hereafter.
LIZ goes. GAZ, remains.
Mid October. CAROL enters carrying two glasses of wine. The Marilyn print is on the wall. She hands GAZ a glass of wine, smiling.
GAZ: Why didn’t you have the chain up?
CAROL: Because I knew it was you.
GAZ: You didn’t know it was me! I was standing away from the peephole! I put that chain there for a reason!
CAROL: I know. I’m sorry.
GAZ: I could have been anybody!
CAROL: [kissing him] But you weren’t, were you? You were my wonderful Gareth.
GAZ: [moving away] I’m sorry I’m late. I couldn’t get here any sooner.
CAROL: I know. I listen to the Mountains weather forecast every day now. Are you all right?
GAZ: I’m tired.
CAROL: I bought some of that Petaluma wine you recommended.
GAZ: Oh, God, did you?—I should have brought you some, I forgot.
CAROL: That’s all right. I enjoyed knowing I was getting it for us. [She raises her glass.] Cheers.
GAZ: Cheers.
She studies him.
CAROL: You don’t look well, my darling. You look worn out. And your skin’s flaking really badly. It’s worse than mine.
GAZ: My skin?
CAROL: Look in the mirror, it’s really flaky.
GAZ: What are you talking about?
CAROL: It must be nerves. The scratching keeps you awake and then next day you’re tired and your skin gets even worse. It’s a vicious circle. I know what I’m talking about.
GAZ: My skin? [He looks in the mirror.] Jesus.
CAROL: If you don’t mind a piece of advice, sweetheart, you ought to be taking care of your inner child. It’s something men don’t do. Even if they know there is such a person—which is hardly ever—they think women are there to do it for them, and of course they can’t. No one can. I’ll give you an article from Cosmo on how to become friends with your own little boy.
GAZ stares at himself, perplexed.
GAZ: How the hell did this happen to me?
CAROL: I can give you something for it. It’s not a problem. Well, it is a problem, but you learn to live with it. I read somewhere that we’re shedding bits of ourselves all the time. When you sleep with someone your lungs are ingesting clouds of each other all night. [Pause. She watches him.] You told her, didn’t you? [Pause.] You told Liz about us. [Pause.] She took it pretty badly, from the look of you.
GAZ: [scratching] No. Not so badly. Not as badly as she should have done.
CAROL: That’s a relief.
GAZ: Yes… It was.
CAROL: So everything’s okay, then?
GAZ: Okay?
CAROL: You said she took it pretty well.
GAZ: Yes. She took it very well.
CAROL: I’m proud of you. You’ve been so brave, Gareth. It’s not an easy thing to do. I’ve been through it myself a few times so I know what I’m talking about—though I’m usually not the dumper, I’m usually the dumpee. The last time it happened I swore I’d never get involved with a married man ever again. Lucky for me I’m weak-willed. There’s no way I could have resisted when you came along. It makes up for all the really rotten things that happened before I met you.
GAZ: [putting his glass down] Carol—
CAROL: Do you want to go out and eat?
GAZ: Eat?
CAROL: It would be nice to sort of celebrate, don’t you think? If that’s not being too insensitive.
GAZ: I’m pretty tired.
CAROL: Okay, we’ll stay in then. I prefer that anyway. Seeing you sitting on my sofa as if you belong there is the most amazing thing. When people say good can come out of even the most hideous disaster, I’ll believe them in future. I think this is our healing time, don’t you? It certainly is for me. If I had to live for the rest of my life believing that poor girl’s death was completely meaningless, I don’t know how I’d cope. It’s almost as if by bringing us together she’s absolved us. Me anyway. I’m the one who killed her.
GAZ: Carol—
CAROL: I know what you’re going to say, and it’s wonderful of you, but you can’t change facts: ‘Death by misadventure’—my name alongside hers in the police records, not yours.
GAZ: Oh, God.
CAROL: One day we’ll look back on this time and realise we were blessed. Somebody up there really cares about us.
GAZ takes a generous swallow of wine.
It’s amazing what a difference it makes when you know what you’re looking for—which I will from now on, thanks to you.
GAZ: Looking for?
CAROL: The wine.
GAZ: Oh. Yes. The wine.
CAROL: I really do think we should go out, and sort of mark the occasion, don’t you?…
I probably shouldn’t admit it but I’m really not a very good cook.
GAZ: Go out?
CAROL: You haven’t been listening to me, have you? You’re so vague. I don’t know how you manage to run a business. [She puts her glass down.] Is Indian all right with you?
GAZ: Indian?
CAROL: [leaving] The one up at North Sydney who fancies me. Okay?
GAZ: Fine. Indian’s fine… All right if I make a phone call? [He goes to the telephone and dials. He scratches.] It’s me… I wanted to make sure you were all right… Have you locked up?… Make sure everything’s locked up… Because you’re alone up there! … Because I worry about you!… No, not yet. It takes time. We’re going out to eat… It was her idea… Because I didn’t know how to get out of it!… I’ll tell her over dinner… Indian, I think. Up at North Sydney.
CAROL comes back.
Make sure you lock up, okay? I have to go now… Yes, I know. Bye. [He hangs up.] When I’m with her I worry about you, and when I’m with you I worry about her… She’s all alone up there.
CAROL: [putting on earrings] A lot of women are alone. She’s not the only woman in the world who’s on her own. And from what you’ve told me she chose it deliberately.
She kisses him.
I’m so happy! Do you know, I can’t think what her name was? What was her name, Gareth?
GAZ: [scratching] Liz. Her name’s Liz.
CAROL: I don’t mean her, I mean her. Up there. What was her name?… [She picks up her bag.] Never mind. It’ll come to me. We should go. They’re often busy on a Sunday night. Though I’m sure if I smile nicely Amir’ll squeeze us in somewhere. Are you ready?
GAZ looks in the mirror.
Don’t worry about the way you look. It’s a result of your domestic upse
t, which will pass if you do some affirmations. You’d be surprised how well they work.
She helps him into his jacket.
Say it after me: ‘I am powerful.’
GAZ: What?
CAROL: ‘I am powerful’, Gareth.
She brushes flakes of dead skin from his shoulders and straightens his jacket.
GAZ: [bemused] ‘I am powerful.’
CAROL: ‘I am in control.’
GAZ downs the rest of his wine.
GAZ: ‘I am in control.’
CAROL: ‘The universe is my friend.’
GAZ: The universe is what?
CAROL: The universe is going to look after you, sweetheart.
She straightens his tie. GAZ finishes CAROL’s wine.
GAZ: That’s what I’m afraid of.
CAROL: [exiting] Come on, Gareth! I’m really ravenous! Let’s go!
GAZ puts the glass down and follows.
END OF ACT ONE
ACT TWO
Mid November. SAUL sketches LIZ who is seated reading a book on chaos theory. The neo-expressionist Saul East is on the wall.
SAUL: You wouldn’t like to take your clothes off, would you?
LIZ: No.
SAUL: I’ll chop some wood for you.
LIZ: I’m not cold.
He concentrates a moment.
SAUL: It’s years since I’ve done any drawing. I feel very exposed. [He works in silence.] I should do a series. If Hockney can do it, why not Saul East?
LIZ: [absently] Because Hockney did it years ago. He’s moved on since then.
SAUL: I’m not afraid of being unfashionable.
LIZ: Of course you are.
A pause.
SAUL: You’re more interesting since you moved up here.
LIZ: [turning a page] Not really. I just don’t care anymore.
SAUL: Well, whatever it is, it suits you.
LIZ: I don’t care about that either.
SAUL: Is that why you got rid of all the mirrors?
LIZ: No.
SAUL: Then why?
LIZ looks up.
LIZ: I’d like to be able to look at myself in a year’s time and see somebody I haven’t seen before.
SAUL: Don’t you like the way you look?
LIZ: I don’t know how I look—that’s the point. It’s impossible to be objective. Especially for women. There’s an Eastern saying: ‘To see one’s face rightly is to know one’s real self’.
SAUL: Who knows what we see anyway. We can never actually see everything. There’s a part of the retina that’s insensitive to light. Something to do with the position of the optic nerve… I find it very comforting to know that not even Leonardo saw everything. [Pause.] We know bugger all really. There could be whole areas that are blanked out and we wouldn’t know because we don’t understand consciousness. Somebody said it’s like a torch beam—if we shone it into a dark room and said, ‘Find me an area with no light on it,’ it wouldn’t know where the dark corners were. Or even if there were any. It would think it saw everything.
LIZ: But you keep looking.
SAUL: What for?… What’s there to look for up here?
LIZ: Little things… I don’t know. Buds opening… Tiny insects. Every day here I’m astonished. It’s a relief. I came here believing nothing in the world could surprise me anymore.
SAUL: Everyone thinks you’re hiding.
LIZ: They can think what they damned well like.
SAUL: You certainly caused an outcry. Did you know it would be like that?
LIZ: No.
SAUL: I still haven’t read it.
LIZ: Fine by me.
SAUL: I thought feminism had died out.
LIZ: Did you?
SAUL: How can you have feminism in a recession? I wouldn’t have thought you could.
People have other things to think about.
LIZ: Do you still read Alison Lurie and Fay Weldon in the bath?
SAUL: Who told you that?
LIZ: You did. Years ago. To give yourself an edge, you said.
He laughs.
SAUL: Yeah, well it worked, didn’t it?
LIZ: Three wives and—how many kids?
SAUL: Five.
A silence.
So what was it all about?
LIZ: What?
SAUL: All the fuss.
LIZ: Among other things, I disagreed with most feminists: I said men didn’t really hate women.
SAUL: Ah.
A silence. He works on.
LIZ: I said they were really far more focused on themselves, and the idea women had that men hated them simply made women feel less unimportant.
SAUL: Hm.
LIZ: I wondered if women had been destined from earliest times to be victims: if we were at the mercy of our biology after all.
SAUL: It’s a very nice neck. You didn’t have to stick it out so far.
LIZ: Manning Clark talked about needing to comfort himself; perhaps that’s what historians do—look for comfort amidst the terror.
SAUL: I don’t know how you see those ideas as comforting.
LIZ: Any explanation nowadays is comforting. I became an historian because I was in love with the idea of continuance… of something epic and ongoing that I was in service to. But it pretty soon dawned on me that the history of the majority of humanity simply didn’t exist. And when you look at the history that does exist, you realise it’s been defined by one sex. The Renaissance and the Reformation were anything but high points for women. We lost nine million in the witch burnings—for crimes like making penises disappear.
SAUL: What do you mean—disappear?
LIZ: Drop off, nest in baskets, and feed on corn. [Pause.] But don’t bother looking up gynocide in the standard texts. You won’t find it. A whole culture is gone. Lost forever. You wipe a lot of memory when nine million people disappear. There were two streams of history. I wanted to help uncover the hidden one—or what’s left of it. If that stream were ever released, women’s awareness would change utterly. Human consciousness would have to change. [Pause.] But somewhere along the line I lost heart. Time’s almost up anyway. The hidden stream’s still hidden… And the surface stream will drown us all. I’ve stopped looking into the past. I’m not sure what it has to offer anymore. And I don’t seem to be having much luck with the future either.
SAUL: Is that in the book?
LIZ: No, but as Edwina pointed out, it might as well have been.
A silence.
Before I wrote the book I was watching a program on rape. None of the rapists viewed the women as objects of anger or hate. What they were angry about was something in themselves, or in society. Not women. Women were simply there to take it out on. And I thought, if you examine the history that still exists, if you went back as far as that goes, and you looked at the suffering of women, it could seem natural and pre-ordained. You think of primitive man witnessing a breech birth; you think of primitive man whose woman has a prolapse of the womb after childbirth, hanging down like an elephant’s trunk between her legs, gangrenous and smelly—and that was common. It happened a lot. Right up until the beginning of this century. Awful things happened to women that couldn’t happen to men—so why not make their blood suspect? Why not consider them impure and the object of divine punishment? Why not forbid their menstrual blood to soil the earth on pain of death? Why not consider that she offends heaven and earth? Why not—if you were a Buddhist—create a blood hell especially for women, filled with blood and filth that took 840,000 days to cross and involved 120 different kinds of torture? [Pause.] I said people’s lives and destinies are genetically pre-determined. I handed the enemy a stick and said, beat us, that’s what we’re for. It was irresponsible, a failure of nerve, and now I have to find a way to make up for it.
A silence.
And why am I telling this to you?
SAUL: Because you know I’m not interested and I don’t care. [He gets up.] Do you want to see how extraordinary and bewitching you look?
> LIZ: You said drawing made you honest.
SAUL: I didn’t say honest. I said exposed. [He puts the sketchbook down.] How could Gareth go completely off the rails like that?
LIZ: I think Gaz has been in some sort of shock. And by the time I realised how bad it was it was too late.
SAUL: I’ve called at the house in Glebe several times. He’s never there.
LIZ: He’s moved in with that girl.
SAUL: What girl?
LIZ: Carol. The one from the accident.
SAUL: Did they ever find out what had happened to the one who died?
LIZ: According to the autopsy she’d been multiply raped.
SAUL picks up the drawing.
SAUL: Do you want to see it?
LIZ: No.
SAUL: It’s not like looking in a mirror. It’s the way I see you.
LIZ: You’re an Australian. We don’t use words like that.
SAUL: Like what?
LIZ: Bewitching. We don’t talk like that. We say, ‘Jeez, you’re a good sort. You’re a bit of all right!’ That’s why Australian women rarely make it to bewitching.
SAUL: Is that so?
LIZ: I think any woman born in Australia must have done something terrible in a previous life.
SAUL: Do you really?
LIZ: Yes, I do.
SAUL: You don’t see any hope for us?
He is closer to her.
LIZ: No, I don’t.
SAUL: None at all?
LIZ: No.
SAUL: That’s a shame. What can we do about it?
They are inches apart, staring at each other.
I used to think you didn’t like me very much and you only put up with me for Gareth. Was I right?
LIZ: Absolutely.
SAUL: So what’s changed?
LIZ: Nothing.
The distance between them disappears. They kiss. Then LIZ smiles and leaves. SAUL removes the neo-expressionist portrait from the wall and takes it out. He comes back carrying a painting of LIZ in a softer style reminiscent of Hockney’s ‘Celia’: wistful, demure, fragile. He hangs it up and goes, taking his sketchbook.
The Girl Who Saw Everything Page 4