On Brunswick Ground

by Catherine de Saint Phalle

  His eyebrows lift and he points to me.

  ‘I haven’t asked her.’

  Bea sighs again.

  ‘But you will. You even asked the postman the other day.’

  He grins wickedly:

  ‘The postwoman.’

  Bea grins back. To change the subject, Mary asks:

  ‘How’s your writing? How’s your book going about the grandmother you never knew?’

  Philip extends his legs and slides his hands into his jeans pockets.

  ‘Obsessed by people who aren’t there.’

  He flashes a smile at me, before adding:

  ‘I can understand that.’

  And he looks at Mary again.

  We have polished off the biscuits and the teapot is empty and cold. The room is sitting around us – waiting.

  15

  MITALI

  I like the colour grey. It’s gentle, like smoke, mist and donkeys. Like the cat. It’s now raining off and on with a southerly wind. A cold autumn day has set its teeth, and people walk briskly. The earth is harder to dig and Mitali’s happy. She loves the cold. Her short leather jacket and yellow scarf remind me of Tintin in Tibet. They never get any mud on them, however hard she works.

  Mitali has just come back from Germany. She and Ian went there to see her dead friend’s mother.

  ‘Olga was the first thing you and I talked about,’ I tell her.

  She stares at me.

  ‘Do you always remember the first thing you talk about with people?’

  A translucent sheen of rain is on my face.

  ‘Maybe that first exchange captures something of the whole ensuing relationship.’

  Mitali shakes her head.

  ‘So we’re warned if it’s going to be a fucking disaster, but we generally carry on anyway. Right?’

  I make a face at her. And she laughs suddenly as if I were the one who had said something funny. I realise it’s only the second time I have heard her laugh, anything more than a hiccup.

  ‘You know, if Jill Meagher had not died then, I wouldn’t have dealt with Olga’s death in the same way. I wouldn’t have understood it. I wouldn’t have had the balls to meet her mother.’

  The way Mitali connects Olga’s death to Jill Meagher’s shows me how this Brunswick tragedy holds so many other events and feelings in its sway. The suburb has been held hostage because a woman has died, because her pain has touched all those who walk the streets where she walked. And Mitali is, for me, the lightning rod that makes it all the more potent.

  She and I are kneeling again as we would in a church. We are planting seeds, laying them down in what seem like tiny graves. Kim is having a wisdom tooth out and will not be overseeing us for a couple of days. I can imagine her, stoic in the chair, looking on unflinchingly at some print of Angkor Wat or Stonehenge as the dentist wrestles with her molars. The pioneer in her won’t complain, or ever explain.

  Being alone with Mitali is a bonus for me. She’s like that man who is called from village to village. He doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary. He settles in, carries on with his everyday business, living exactly like the other villagers, but he’s the rainmaker – when he is around rain always comes. Maybe it’s the very quality of Mitali’s sadness or joy, or her potty mouth, which make her my ‘rainmaker.’

  Like animals that look at you as if they can hear what you think, Mitali has her eyes on me. She frowns.

  ‘Apart from Ian, you’re the only person I can talk to about my brother. As if some fragment of him had mysteriously reached you. Sometimes, I have the feeling when I see you that he’s closer. If I see you, he’s not so dead, as if you were the same mob, as if he’d rubbed off on you. Shit. I know it’s crazy.’

  I bend towards the earth, and I look at it. Our silence is so dense that I can’t even feel the air or the rain anymore. I know I mustn’t answer. This is voodoo territory. The slightest inappropriate word and our friendship could break like crystal. We continue working in a sparse, newly planted garden. Yet our movements seem to flow from us, and the job gets done without real effort. The plants are a row of Dickensian orphans waiting at the workhouse, but the house is a brazen hussy reeking of paint. I ask Mitali how her trip went. She leans back on her heels, looking straight ahead.

  ‘Olga’s mother turned out to be a poet and a bloody good one. Ian bought me a translation of her work over there. She lives in the country outside Hamburg, near a lake. I liked the air, the trees, even the clouds. It was a different sky, different water, different bird cries, but that didn’t explain it. It was the place itself, her place. Did you know that in medieval times people thought hell was a land without birds?’

  I smile at her.

  ’No, Mitali, but, hey, it makes beautiful sense. What are Olga’s mother’s poems like?’

  She turns round to look at me.

  ‘Light, almost Japanese … They shimmer on the page like those delicate black ink landscapes. But they jump into your heart, smacking of fucking eternity.’

  Mitali digs a few more graves.

  ‘We hardly talked of Olga. It wasn’t that she couldn’t bring herself to, it was just that somehow being together was enough. She knew why I had come.’

  ‘Had you met her before?’ I ask.

  Mitali looks at me fiercely, as if my question were inane.

  ‘No.’

  I frown.

  ‘But …’

  She swings round and growls.

  ‘I’ll tell you why we went to see her. I killed her daughter. Good enough reason for you?’

  I sit back on my heels. The whole garden feels like a ticking bomb.

  ‘Yes, it is, Mitali.’

  She quietens down after that.

  ‘I had rented a car. I took Olga for a drive to show her the Great Ocean Road. I was wearing thongs. One got caught in the accelerator. I drove us into a telegraph pole. I didn’t have a scratch. She was okay at first, just neck problems, and a headache that wouldn’t go away … They did all the tests. She returned to Germany a few days later. But once she got there, after the flight, after the jet lag, after God knows what, she fell into a coma and stayed in it for a year before they turned off the machine.’

  She stops and passes the back of her hand over her forehead.

  Thank goodness we’re in a garden, I think, waiting for a faulty tap of seconds to stop dripping. Mitali seems frozen by her own words. Why did she tell me, I wonder.

  ‘When she was here as a student, Olga’s only real connection was with me. Then she came back to see me, and to meet Ian – not to die, not to be killed here.’

  Mitali is sitting on her heels now.

  ‘I wanted to go and see her in hospital but her mother wrote to me, telling me it would be better if I came when she showed signs of waking up. In the end I did fly over, more than a month after her death.’

  ‘What was Olga like, Mitali?’

  Her face twists round towards me.

  ‘She was tall …’

  Mitali lifts her arm towards the trees.

  ‘… Oh, so tall. Her eyes were ice-blue slits. She had flat cheekbones, long, skinny fingers with nails bitten to the quick, and she walked proudly though she had no pride.’

  Suddenly the image of her friend starts welling out of Mitali and I see Olga amble in the garden, tossing her head, her pale eyes shedding unseeing, impatient glances.

  ‘Once she came back upset from a trip to the chemist’s, saying: “I don’t think they like me in that chemist.” Knowing her, I took that to be a fucking understatement. She had gone there to get a German natural remedy. I asked her what happened.’

  Mitali grins at the sky, suddenly acquiring a thick German accent.

  ‘“Vell, I asked zem to make zis German remedy for me. I had ze old bottle with ze German ingredients on it. All zey had to do vas copy. But no, zey told me zey had an Aus-tralian equivalent. So I asked zem, most politely, if zey had a choice between an FJ Holden and a Mercedes, vich vould zey choose? A car zat
vent plom, plom, plom across ze desert, or a car zat vent vroom, vroom, vroom on ze autobahn?’”

  Mitali smiles through her tears. Her skin glows like honey across her cheekbones.

  I look at the house erect in the slanting shadows. She frowns.

  ‘You understand why I needed to go to Germany. I had to. I expected many things, but not that it would be so easy, so …’

  She stops a second or two before continuing.

  ‘There’s nothing sexy about Hamburg, but I keep thinking of it. A quiet, contained place, tired hills, out of breath – dull greens, heavy skies, a congested hausfrau beauty. Olga’s mother’s house was nothing to write home about either. German, clean, recycling bins with tags on them, jams with tags on them, bedrooms like dormitories for one. But fuck, her poems were something else.’

  She shakes her black cloud of hair.

  ‘As soon as we walked in the door it was as if we had always been there. Suddenly, there was no need to discuss anything. It was the first time I ever saw the woman. But we were soon going through the easy motions of life together. There we were having tea, breakfast, getting up, talking in the garden, having walks, reading by the fire, but it didn’t matter what we did – we were fucking happy, the three of us – even though grief, worse than grief, is what got us together. She’s coming to see us next year. Just before we left she gave me something of Olga’s,’ she touches her yellow scarf. ‘Nothing else was needed, no explanations, no condolences, not even the circumstances of Olga’s dying.’

  She looks up.

  ‘Can you believe it? Such closeness, really, such undefined closeness.’

  I stop digging and look at her cloud of hair, her slim neck, her Indian cleanliness that makes me feel I could eat from her floor, her impatient smile that seems to defy anything before you can think it up. Yet she always helps me to hear the great power of gentleness all around us, as wild things do. A magpie lands close to us and I ask:

  ‘Do you remember Bea?’

  ‘Yes, of course I do, we worked in her garden a few times. You got on well with her, didn’t you? I thought you would.’

  I close a little grave and pat a seed safely into the earth.

  ‘Bea and I do get on well. She told me that some people die bit by bit. They start acting out who they used to be, what they used to say, but they’re just going through the motions – already, they’re no longer really there. This happened to Bea’s father. She was never that close to him. It made it even worse – a double leave of absence. Towards the end, she felt like lifting her father’s eyelids to see if he was still behind them.’

  Mitali wrinkles her brow again.

  ‘The last time Olga came here, to Brunswick, she was kind of different – like a student again – a student, but not Olga … Maybe Olga started dying then …’

  I stop planting, and say:

  ‘Maybe even people who die as a result of an accident begin dying before they are killed.’

  Mitali continues working without lifting her head, without answering.

  ‘Maybe our stories end, and our lives just find a way out. Maybe there are no more pieces to finish the puzzle, and we’ve done our dash.’

  ‘You and your maybes …’

  Her frown snaps back into place. I suppose it’s an easy guess to say she’s thinking of her brother.

  ‘I killed him too, you know.’

  Her tone is almost conversational, which makes it all the more of a jolt.

  ‘I did. I pulled the plug. He was clinically brain dead. They were keeping him alive on a life-support machine. The doctors asked us if they should do it or if we wanted to. They all looked at me. I had no choice. He would have wanted me to do it.’

  She doesn’t move now, nor does the garden, nor do I.

  ‘Fuck, why do I tell you all this?’

  I wait and ask:

  ‘Olga’s mother. She’s made everything better, hasn’t she?’

  She turns round to face me.

  ‘Yes, she has.’

  I dig the next seed deeper than I should. It will have to crawl and fight its way to the surface. Maybe our story, Jack’s and mine, has ended, and like that seedling, it’s buried too deep in memory to be recalled. Suddenly I feel Mitali’s hands covering mine over my trowel, unearthing the seed and lifting it up to a shallower grave. I know that she’s not supervising my gardening. We both look up at the sky that seems higher than usual, as unattainable as the white ceiling you stare at from a hospital bed. Going back to work and shutting up seems the best thing to do after that.

  Then it happens. Like all the things you don’t expect, it seems perfectly ordinary at first. Mitali keels over in the earth, she crumples upon herself in slow motion and then just lies there. I notice her extended palm half uncurled. The rest of her body could have been dropped from the sky. I snap out of my trance. Half-remembered information pops into my brain. I try to find a pulse on her wrist, near her neck. I can’t find anything. I grab my phone and stare at the keyboard for a split second before keying triple 0. A female voice answers and I ask for help. I explain where we are. I describe Mitali’s faint. She tells me to wait near her, to cover her if possible. I hate myself for not knowing first-aid procedures. I strip off my jacket to cover her, and put my ear against her heart. It’s beating. Then I call and leave a message for Ian while I’m waiting for them.

  Again time is like a drop of water that won’t fall. The whole winter sky is bending over us, making us as minute, as infinite, as each dripping second. But suddenly the ambulance is there, parked in the street behind the gate. Two paramedics, a man and a woman, come floating up the drive. As I stare I don’t see which one has opened the gate, which one is walking in front of the other; all I see is a wave of quiet urgency and composure that surges up, kneels, takes her pulse, probes, lifts her eyelids, forces her mouth open and gives Mitali an injection in one fluid stream. At the same time, they are shooting questions at me. Then, in a twinkling, she’s on a stretcher, looking slight and frail. They lift her too easily, taking her away so fast that I have to run after them, feeling stiff, like you do in those clogging dreams where you wade through syrupy air. Soon we are in the ambulance. They are feeding me information all the time, explaining quietly that she has probably had an aneurysm. I text Ian again to tell him which hospital they are taking her to.

  When the ambulance docks in the emergency bay, he’s already there. He must have known it would be the Royal Melbourne. Everything is held in his quiet eyes as he runs to her side. He looks the same as usual, except for his face, which seems whiter than anything in the hospital. He hardly has the time to bend over her; they are wheeling her away. A woman at the information desk comes up and tells him what is going on and how long he will have to wait before he can see her. Then Ian and I are sitting next to each other. He has his elbows on his knees, holding his own hands as if he were going to fall. I daren’t move or speak. When he asks me what happened, I answer in the shortest, clearest way I can. I don’t say any consoling things. I just wait with him, our shoulders, our knees touching without our being aware of it. We just wait and wait - half an hour, three-quarters. Then the woman at the information desk beckons Ian forward. He can go and see her now. I hover in the background, but he grabs my arm. I know suddenly that he is scared. I recognise the animal fear of loss.

  Soon we are in a treatment room wide open to the corridor. Mitali is lying in a metallic cot, looking tiny, her cloud of hair on the dead-white pillow. Ian walks in to her with a rushing slowness as if time had got mangled in his long stride. He is bending over her dark face and only then do I see that her eyes are wide open. She’s on a drip. The room is like an operating room with a curtain flung wide open, a theatre with Mitali lying like a small votive offering to an unnameable fear.

  I wait on the edge and look at them. A doctor walks in and explains that she has indeed had a small aneurysm, that she will have to be on medication and be checked regularly, but that she should be okay to go home tomorro
w. Ian asks if he can stay and they agree. The anxiety drains from his face. It’s time for me to go.

  I walk along the hospital corridor, with smaller rooms, with smaller curtains flung aside, each with its white purgatorial bed, and its emergency patient exposed. Then the young doctor who diagnosed Jack walks past – I recognise him, but he doesn’t remember me.

  16

  SYDNEY ROAD

  A week goes by, and another one. Not seeing Mitali at work, my days become shadows of themselves. Tonight I go and see her at home. When I ring the bell, Ian greets me easily, as if I were a sibling turned up out of nowhere. He points to the garden, and follows when I go to find her. We discover Mitali gardening slowly, planting a grevillea. Her boyishness has vanished. Ian stands behind me with his hands in his pockets. She sits back on her heels when I come and flicks my knee with her muddy glove. I sit down next to her on the ground. And suddenly all is as before. She swears about the medication, or Ian’s fussing about her, but the sting has gone from her tone.

  When I leave, it is not dark. The armless melaleucas with their unimaginable sap, their sagging folds, usher me down the street. I walk into the empty house. Its tiny garden is looking depleted, out of breath. My mobile rings in my pocket. It’s Mary. At the start I don’t understand what she wants. It’s about an art opening.

  ‘You remember that guy Philip Paulson? It’s his exhibition … a show of his latest works. You must come, please. We can’t do this without you old mate.’

  I smile, but before I can say anything she presses on.

  ‘Sarah will be there with my Dad. They’re both turning up. Please … Listen, I know she told you he’s alive and kicking.’

  ‘With your Dad …’

  It takes me a few seconds to digest this.

  ‘But that’s grand, Mary.’

  Mary is not so enthusiastic.

  ‘They’ll probably be quarrelling all the way over … Or fucking like rabbits … Anyway, it’s now. I wasn’t even going to be there, but … I changed my mind. It’s in Sydney Road, just around the corner from you. So you have no excuse.’

  All the same, she spells out the address in a grave tone as if it were some outlandish place. As she begs and explains, you’d think she was asking me to be present at her guillotining in the city square. ‘Listen, Philip has painted me and included the thing in his exhibition. The picture is here, in Brunswick.’