Night Street

by Kristel Thornell

  Soon there is no hiding anything and she finds herself rolling from side to side like a fidgety insomniac. She is in a mounting torment of indecision. Who to turn to? Which touch to receive? It is too much, in the manner of a relentless savage tickling; she is beyond her own control.

  Who is she trying to fool? One of the men has kept his hat on, but still, she has never been able to keep track of which is which; the one without a hat looks a little as Paul might have looked, had he grown up. Their caresses flow together, the two sets of hands complementing one another, touching, overlapping, behaving as a single pair of ubiquitous hands. She has never been touched like this, with no way out.

  It is stuffy and hard to see from under her hair, which winds around her face. She is breathing roughly through her mouth, her legs slackening and falling further apart; this is probably shameful. The men are beginning to smile, as if unable to resist a joke much longer. She is ready to say, enough, or, wait a minute, but the two of them—him on the left and him on the right—are so well synchronised, like a ventriloquist and his dummy.

  If the men complete one another so perfectly, what is her role? Not knowing makes her anxious. Is she superfluous? The sea breeze lifts, the drapes, those airy slabs of sky, twitching violently.

  Clarice comes back to her senses in a sweat, but the tension of the dream leaks quickly away. Her real bed is small, narrow, unembellished and very tightly tucked. She briefly thrashes her legs to loosen the constrained feeling; no luck for now, but she will try again later.

  A couple of painters came once to speak to Meldrum’s class about Asian art. They were a vivid pair, married but childless and just returned from a year in Japan that had made passionate Japanophiles of them. It was rumoured that they engaged in secret ceremonies they had learned over there, wearing just kimonos.

  Dadie was the woman’s name. She had long dark hair, stylish and possibly dyed, and you could tell that the time in Japan had made life seem enigmatic and precious to her; she was living in some trance. You could see her in a kimono. Clarice had forgotten the husband’s name. He had had an allure similar to his wife’s—a reserved enthralment—but was more austere and let her do the talking.

  Dadie insisted on the importance of a Japanese word: ma. ‘Loosely translated, it means something such as “pause” or “gap”,’ she elaborated, speaking as if gazing spellbound at a vista only recently revealed to her.

  Someone had loudly interjected that ma meant but in Italian.

  ‘Oh?’ responded Dadie pleasantly, though she was on a path she could not be distracted from. ‘Perhaps that’s not unfitting.’ Ma, she had gone on to explain, was employed to describe the use of empty space in the design of a garden— garden design being an art in its own right in Japan. ‘The Japanese know the value of empty space.’ Dadie paused to allow her words to shine through a bubble of emptiness. ‘They recognise it as a crucial element of composition.’

  Arthur was in that classroom, out of Clarice’s view but not her sense of the moment. Remembering in her small, tight bed, ruffled by the dream, though gradually more serene, she thinks that it takes time to weigh this notion of ma, to give your blessing to its starkness. But of course empty space is sparkling, heartbreaking, sensual. It can be turned to your advantage.

  32

  There is a poor dear sitting on the far side of the solarium. She is nicely witchy, with noble, sloping bones and skin like creased silk. Someone has wrapped her in a sad, grey shawl. Red might have lifted her mood; a bit of red will do it. The old girl appears to be taken with the clouds, high and neat, that the windows frame.

  Those clouds are white innocence. No intimation of rain. It is not that clouds are malicious or that they bluff; their intentions are changeable because their ideas are so transient. Over and over, they embody the slightest whim.

  If Clarice were feeling a little stronger, she would talk to the woman, who looks old but could even be her own age. Forty-eight! Already getting on in years. She is not often at ease with strangers. Solitude is the artist’s luxury, valuable currency— but as with any wealth, it is unadvisable to hoard. She is not uncomfortable in the old woman’s presence, though. Maybe it is her air of not having long to go; a slackness around the mouth that could be the softening of fatigue or the start of a grin.

  The redhead bustles in, paying no attention to the old girl. This is a restful thing about age, she supposes, the way it ushers you into invisibility, as though into the plush recess of a theatre booth.

  The nurse asks, ‘A piece of toast?’

  While the redhead is certainly tough, she is not mean like Father’s nurse. Really not persecutory at all. She has forgiven Clarice for rejecting lunch.

  The redhead lowers her voice. ‘Raisin toast? Don’t tell the others.’

  Clarice is sorry to have no use for the secret.

  ‘Soup? Cook made potato soup. You’ll want something.’

  She would not mind a cup of tea, actually. Good strong tea, milky. A generous dissolving cloud of milk—farm milk. It would take such an effort to ask.

  ‘Just a slice of bread? I’ll sprinkle sugar on it.’

  ‘Not hungry.’ Her voice comes and goes; you cannot always be polite and good—it is much easier once you have accepted this. The nurse’s hand drops to Clarice’s shoulder, like a travel-spent bird landing. That hand has a satisfying volume and an agreeably androgynous, bulky shape lit by shades of peach and mottled plum on the underside. She feels her own frailty beneath it and does not like it.

  ‘Not even an apple?’ the nurse whispers seductively. ‘I’ll cut it into pieces.’

  Shaking her head causes a prickling in her rib cage. The redhead’s face is still asking about the apple. Clarice attempts to assemble the components of a smile. This makes her cough and there is the sound: a chesty vibration, a faint whistling in the tree branches of her lungs; a thin, eerie wind. The muscles between her ribs feel bruised, overly human. An interesting way to cough, low, fundamental, the whole body a casualty. She leans back against the chair. It addles her that repose can be as tranquillising as work.

  The hand on Clarice’s shoulder moves back and forth, the bird anxious. ‘You know, you’ll come through this, the doc says. He’s a great believer in mind over matter.’

  The mention of a doctor gentles her, making her think of her own Doctor. ‘So am I. The mind’s potential is larger than our common idea of it.’

  The redhead’s eyebrows seem to have lifted, but not unkindly. Clarice smiles again, recalling the face of that old dear over by the window; she is a little worried for her.

  33

  Paul is elsewhere; you could not quite say where he is. Louise, the gloating, glowing one, is in the kitchen with Mum. Exultant accomplices, they are making peanut biscuits. The steep spirals of their laughter are as sweet and forbidden as the biscuits that are still cooking. If you do not wait till they are ready, the dough will make you sick.

  But in the drawing room, in shadow, Rosamund, who is a doll but also an imposing princess, reclines in her bower that is regal with wattle and velvet ribbons—a shockingly vibrant vision, this, which Clarice has orchestrated.

  ‘Puss. Puss!’ She tempts Daffy forward with a twig.

  Daffy’s grey-flecked yellow eyes are ripe with cat madness. Spontaneous and calculated, she leaps into a pool of sun, like an actor into a spotlight. The rabbit trap might have taken her leg but not a whit of her spirit; cats have stupendous freedom in them.

  Clarice, bored: ‘Then the fairies floated cartwheeling to the top branch of the oak. The children did not realise the fairies were keeping watch over them. Louise skipped off along the bank of the Yarra, Clarice just behind . . .’

  A little distracted, Rosamund and Daffy listen to the end of the latest episode of Mum’s before-bed story. The doll and the cat love Clarice as crazily, as perfectly as Mum loves Louise.

  When the Nocturne begins, Clarice understands that she is not in fact with Rosamund and Daffy, because that music cam
e after and it has been a while, so long since the three friends were the points of a magic triangle.

  34

  She is not taken to the solarium.

  Sleep washes tentatively against spiky islands of coughing. Breathing is a chore. Light slides across her sickroom trailing shadow, like the train of a gown; then it begins its late-afternoon metamorphosis. This moment—her evening work session approaching, the second daily reward of three hours—always lifts her. Because what she yearns for is close: soon she will be pulling her cart along the coast road.

  Once or twice, the redhead tries to entice her with food. Clarice would oblige if she could, but appetite is one more emptied box. She gratefully accepts water from a cup, however. The doctor comes, listens to her chest and does some other things to which she does not pay much attention.

  ‘I was here before,’ Louise says. Her sister in the visitor’s chair, beside the desiccating pinkish roses. ‘I came the other day.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’re even paler than usual. Look at you.’ Not managing to be humorous: ‘Clarice’s ivory skin.’

  ‘You’re wearing my bracelet.’

  ‘This? Well, I’ve been staying at the house and I borrowed it. Anyway, you remember that time, with my jumper.’

  ‘No, I’ve forgotten. I love the green in the glass bits. So I’ll be wanting it back.’

  ‘Makes you think of a fancy motor—the green.’

  ‘It does. I’m going to need some things from home. My trolley. Some supplies. I’ll make you a list. While I think of it, here’s the key to the shed. Father can’t be trusted with it.’

  ‘He can’t?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  ‘Good of you. Take that, too.’

  ‘What’s the second key?’

  She feels panic. ‘Take it.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’

  ‘It’s for a bathing box.’

  ‘A bathing box?’

  ‘At Half Moon Bay. Go before Thursday.’

  ‘Thursday. You’re becoming demanding in your old age.’

  ‘I am, but it’s important, Louise. Please. You’ll leave a note there for me. And a painting, won’t you?’

  ‘Oh God. A tryst?’

  ‘You will, won’t you?’ She hears herself coming across as desperate.

  ‘Calm down. I’ll do whatever you want.’

  ‘So. Are you shocked?’

  ‘Not really.’ Next to Louise, the roses are a paltry gesture at beauty; she puts them to shame.

  ‘I imagined you’d be shocked.’

  ‘Relieved, I think.’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you who it is. It’s not the Carruthers boy.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ Louise laughs a little, appearing stricken. ‘You’re always secretive.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. Well, no—not really. That’s how I am. Louise?’

  ‘Or how you decide to be. What? Don’t tire yourself out.’

  ‘I’m not tired now. How are you?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘The kiddies?’

  ‘Troublemakers.’ She smiles unevenly.

  ‘You really do look a lot like Louise Brooks. You could be twins.’

  ‘Do I? Still?’ She sinks one hand into her glossy cropped hair and pouts. ‘Everyone always used to tell me that.’ Her face becomes sweet and sisterly.

  One time as she sleeps, pressure on her bladder lends her dreams an erotic mood that does not seem to have anything to do with the dreamed events; it passes over them, a savoury odour on the wind, coming from someone else’s cooking.

  Collins Street. Her city is enfolded in mist, which she wears like a stole. She can make out the spiky silhouette of the Manchester Unity Building, that man-made mountain, its tower and spire triumphantly lit. There is no one else around to enjoy it. Good to be alone, though, finally. It is late. Her only city. All the things that others find unsightly are extra reasons for tenderness, as far as she is concerned, as would be the idiosyncrasies of an adored child.

  Mouth open, she is tasting wood and coal smoke, a woman’s perfume, the moist cold of a Melbourne night, its streamlined thinking in black, blue, purple, when a motorcar approaches from behind. She steps quickly out of the road and onto the footpath.

  A girl, a woman. Olive of the summery frock and the twirling? It seems to be, but then she turns further and—how quickly one person can melt into someone else—it is Ada. Slim, almost a shadow. Her friend, Ada, peering out through the rear window into the motor’s wake, as its refined, funereal form disappears.

  She would like to stop the car and ask Ada one or two things. What has she been painting? It would be wrong for Ada to let her painting go, though so many do. Too late. Clarice waves, but cannot tell if Ada has seen her.

  Woken by her throbbing bladder, she is mildly aroused. So full with that ache at her centre, replete, she delays ringing the bell on the nightstand. She lies there until she cannot postpone it. She rings. Depending on others is new and awkward, like borrowing a showy person’s clothes. She rings again. The quiet suggests collective sleep, but subconscious adventures are a private matter, each dipping into his well. Or do all the wells draw from the same body of water?

  The redhead. Yawning but amenable. ‘Do you need the bedpan, love? Cold night, isn’t it?’ In the lamplight, her red hair sticks out, a charming coppery chaos of angles.

  Clarice nods, sorry to have disturbed her. She was unaware of the cold, although they are halfway down the path of winter. She savours winter’s austerity, the dramatic things it does to sky and skin, and hates to be away from the weather. Even when Mum was bad, near the end, she could steal the odd moment to lean against the garden fence and breathe. Her hands, then and now: hot, itchy and unhappy; not using them for painting makes her hands bereft.

  She tinkles against the enamel, appreciating the nurse’s tact. Her thighs are mauve-grey and unusually feeble. Those do not appear to be the legs that stride the streets of Beaumaris day after day, the legs grasped by the Doctor’s hands. Are they really the same that have always held her up?

  Her nightgown rearranged, she finds herself perched on the side of the hard little bed, as if she were her own visitor—sick Clarice’s visitor. But no one is lying in the bed; there is a feeling of expectation, as though sick Clarice might soon return. She does not want her to.

  The Clarice who is only visiting the ailing, absent Clarice sees the moon. Where the curtain does not meet the window frame, she recognises the midwinter moon, coyly incomplete, clouded. She is as dizzy as a girl.

  ‘Could you please open the curtain?’ she asks.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The curtain.’ She shakily lifts her arm to mime pulling it across.

  The redhead considers this. You would think looking at the moon was bad for the health. An old idea, no? The moon and madness.

  There is a heavy thud. From which room it has come, Clarice is not sure; she cannot find the layout of this place in her memories. How many days is it since the storm? Some unlucky thing must have fallen out of bed. Low groaning follows the initial sound. The old woman from the solarium? She did not look sturdy and Clarice fears for her.

  ‘Good gracious,’ exclaims the nurse, resigned.

  She hurriedly helps Clarice into bed, but—about to rush off—pauses and pulls the curtain aside.

  Some time after, the redhead’s consoling voice can be heard, far off.

  Clarice calls, uneasily, ‘Is she alright?’

  No reply, but there are other sounds and she imagines the movements of limbs and mouths causing those vibrations—metallic, wooden, human—that cruise the air to her ears. The senses. She kicks at the tight sheet, then, weary, allows her focus to narrow. Now she listens only to the air coming in; a sort of ragged sucking on the inhalation. Her lungs are an accordion expanding and contracting, but the sound is of a humbler
instrument. A rattle, a baby’s half-broken rattle. Is this reflex, instinct?

  But another breath and she treats herself to the strange moon. The pleasure of it, more intense for having earlier been denied, makes her think her loneliness could be a form of union in disguise.

  The sun pokes over the horizon. Globular and glistening. Like illicit lovers creeping back into clothes, the few gum trees she can make out ease stealthily into their daytime selves.

  35

  Though she has heard the name of this doctor on several occasions, it will not stick, so, copying the redhead, she calls him the doc. For fun, but also out of loyalty—to differentiate him from the Doctor. ‘We’ll have to try a bit harder,’ the doc says. There is affection overflowing from this. He seems to be telling a circuitous joke, the punchline just around the corner; she cackles a little, sensing it, as a spiritualist might a presence on the other side. This levity has been coming in waves. ‘Clarice,’ he murmurs, brushing her stringy hair from her eyes.

  Concern, in his face, and she must look a fright, but she has no use for mirrors. For some time, she has been lightening her load, dispensing with unnecessary burdens; there is an elegant simplicity to it. She has the impression—although it is not the case, for obvious reasons—that Mum is at the foot of the bed, attentively overseeing. Mum beams her approval, thrilled; she is kidding herself that Clarice might marry the doc. Marry, no, not this time around, but he is pleasantly quiet and methodical, his breath cleanly saline, maritime.