Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  As a result of his stroke, my husband is bedridden and has lost the sight in one eye. I feel sure that had he received attention sooner, the effects of his stroke would have been less severe.

  I need not hesitate to say …

  (And here Aunt Nina hesitated, as in her draft of the letter she has crossed out a long list of complaints, contenting herself finally with:)

  I find the conduct of the local hospital staff reprehensible in the circumstances. I expect you will look into this matter.

  Officially typed on the old Remington, single spaced with a carbon copy kept for reference, the letter went off to the Commonwealth department responsible for the health of war veterans.

  Having enquired into the matter as asked, the department replied that on the 26th December 1955, the preceding Boxing Day, Dr Garth Furlonger had reportedly been brought into the casualty department of the Scunthorpe Hospital by his brother, Mr Antony Furlonger of Coolang, having sustained a self-inflicted wound to the left hand. As Dr Furlonger had been in an inebriated state and was suffering from an asthma attack, it had not been possible to administer anaesthetic in order to sew his wound. A wait of several hours ensued before Dr Furlonger’s blood alcohol level was low enough for him to take an anaesthetic. During that time, Dr Furlonger failed to control his behaviour in a reasonable manner. His ‘declaiming’ could be heard throughout the hospital and was a disturbance to other patients.

  Dr Stimson, who had been on duty on Boxing Day 1955, accordingly asked Mrs Furlonger on Christmas Day 1956 whether her husband wasn’t simply inebriated. Asked how much liquor her husband had drunk in the morning before his fall, Mrs Furlonger had answered that to her knowledge the better part of a bottle of overproof rum had been consumed. This being the case, Dr Stimson suggested that Mrs Furlonger wait a couple of hours and then call again, as Dr Stimson had to attend a delivery. She was apprised of the correct procedure for drunkenness.

  Aunt Nina persisted. Two hours was not seven hours. Her husband, far from raising his voice on this occasion, had been unconscious for most of Christmas Day 1956 and indeed for a whole week afterwards.

  If there was a reply, Aunt Nina didn’t pin this one to the back of her carbon copy. A letter to someone called Leon followed. It was dated Feb 1957 and begged him please, please to take her financial affairs in hand as she could no longer cope and was headed for the madhouse. The nieces, dear children, were now back in Melbourne having both sustained an outbreak of headlice in the disastrous period after Christmas when not only was Garth so ill, but her father moved from Mountshannon to Clare, no doubt in order to give her moral support, but oh, Leon, was it any wonder she was almost out of her mind?

  The lice began as I sat cross-legged on my bed at Clare, bloody, rebandaged and playing some very poor poker hands.

  Allegra was dealing herself royal flushes and doing me out of my supply of Christmas chocolate. When she went for my lime creams, I started to sob in a slow, hopeless fashion. And to scratch. To shut me up, Allegra opened the sock drawer and took out two of the little sherries she’d secreted in there before the day’s drama had begun. Then she too started to scratch.

  Consider the nit, Pediculus humanus capitis. It does not call itself that. We are not privy to its thoughts, though it probably chose us as its boon companions while we were metamorphosing from apes. The nit, though not literate, anticipated us in its flexible core and adapted its claws for grasping either the round follicle of European hair or the oval follicle of African hair. And as louse leapt from oval to round and back again, the cardinal types performed stud duties, producing crossbred and comeback lice capable of infesting every type of human head up to and including the Asian with its hair follicle in the shape of a bean. It stuck the eggs to the bases of hair shafts, whatever their racial origin, with insoluble glue.

  Kero, metho and infusions of eucalyptus bark have been used to dislodge nit progeny. Aunt Nina, rather than compound her problems in Scunthorpe by going to the hospital dispensary for help, took to our heads, and later also to the heads of our grandfather and our prostrated uncle, with diluted sheep dip and curry combs which we were on no account to mix up or deliberately interchange with any article that might pass near the thick and springy crown of auburn hair that was louseless and hers.

  Nits were a blow to Aunt Nina, whose class of people did not carry them. In spite of her, they appeared to have risen through the ranks, striving for cleaner and cleaner scalps, where subcutaneous blood vessels yielded more and more readily to the needle-like proboscis. Once on the better class of scalp, the nits, true to the ground plan shared by all living things, were most reluctant to leave.

  Where had they come from? Aunt Nina was certain she knew. We had in our possession a photograph, taken in the month before Christmas, in which we were wearing funny clothes. Although the louse is unable to live without an ecology of human heads to cling to, Aunt Nina blamed its arrival among gentry on the dress Allegra was wearing. There were two reasons for this: firstly, it was a wedding dress and Aunt Nina saw her opportunity to let us know we were still in trouble over the Christmas Day episode, and secondly, we were foolhardy enough to tell her where the dress had come from.

  Add an ‘r’ to our surname, and in Italian the Corretti are the upright and well-bred ones. Notwithstanding, Aunt Nina didn’t like our father.

  Perhaps it was because he had said in his beautiful, lightly tinted accent that the word Motte was not, as our imaginative mother had claimed, a Huguenot corruption of the word mot and therefore indicative of a learned tribe set upon by misfortune and driven to the Antipodes, but the French word for clod. Furthermore, the Mottes’ knowledge of art could be described as a tendency to confuse Rubens with Botticelli, probably because the name Rubens was synonymous with bottoms in that quarter. As for Rembrandt, he drew sheds well, but warts were warts, and they’d been spotted on Rembrandt chins and noses, the general opinion being that he ought to have painted people reading books to cover them up.

  Unbeknownst to the rest of the family, who found his artistic predilections and preoccupations bewildering, my father was a member of the postwar avant garde. He painted neither Great Men nor their wives. His work bore no relationship to the painting of the stud bull at Clare which was done in 1908 by an itinerant bushman called A. Twine.

  A. Twine’s father had been a dentist. I remember Aunt Nina telling my father so on one occasion at our home in Melbourne. He laughed in reply, a mellow, Latin laugh. Aunt Nina didn’t say How rude, but she’d worn her lips as though she was saying it. Desperate that she should see he wasn’t laughing at her, just at the idea of what she’d said, I climbed up on her, saying, ‘Neeny, Neeny, that isn’t what he means.’ I succeeded only in having her change the subject for my sake. Which put my father further on the outer.

  My mother tried hard to take my father’s part, but in doing so, she made bizarre mistakes. She would try, impossibly, to link him with Italian village painters who did altar pieces and frescoes for churches. But my father was not religious, not in the altar piece sense of the word, anyway.

  I supposed the depth of Aunt Nina’s problem with my father was really rubbish dumps, and it must be said that at ten I was beginning to feel there was more to life than traipsing after him through them. We did not go to the tip as it is customary for people to go, with trailers full of things to throw out. We went as connoisseurs: to view life’s wrack, and to collect.

  I can see my father sauntering out through the canyons of muck in his dump-visiting boots. I am sighing, but dramatic escapes of air from my person meet with no response. The shapely ears of Henry Coretti, with maps of Australia outlining the entrances to the auditory canals, are attuned to the dump sirens, not to me. These sirens, invisible to the innocent eye but all too evident to the initiated one, lie on their rotting chaises longues in their salons of squalor, calling throatily, Henry! Dadda has ‘Englished’ his name. Henry! the sirens call, longing to be ravished by his light blue eyes; Henry! and he tracks t
hem down with relish.

  He has disappeared, and I am at a place where a band of waste forms a delta, part-covered in dirt. The graders have been busy here forking the muck into a colossal pit. Two children are playing in the dank, shoulder-high declivity that looks from where I am standing like the margins of a woman’s thighs. I suppose from their activities that the children are girls, sisters perhaps like Allegra and me, but younger. Their fair hair is cropped off, basin style. One wears overalls, the other, a green dress far too big for her: on her feet she has a battered pair of high-heeled shoes.

  They have made themselves a house in the declivity with pieces of broken mirror; a buckled painting of a cow, marked off for cuts of meat; two rusted kitchen chairs; and part of a table on which they have placed jars and cans and bottles. Periodically, the child in the dress slummocks a circuit over the junk heaps, pushing a bashed pink baby’s pram.

  ‘Don’t forget the provisions, Mum!’ The child in the declivity has a surprisingly rasping voice. ‘There’s going to be a general alert today. Ya listenin’?’ Her round head swivels above the mound. ‘Kelly, I’m talkin’ to ya!’ Then she notices me. ‘We’re surrounded, Kelly. Ya better come ’ome. There’s wogs up the hill!’

  The child with the pram looks up at me on my mound of muck and grins. It is a pretty face, clear-skinned with bright blue eyes in it. The other child hurriedly scrambles out of her den. ‘Give the kid ’ere!’ she croaks and grabs the pram handle. Doncha realise the air’s radioactive?’

  ‘Aw, Maggie!’

  ‘I’m not bloody Maggie, I’m yer bloody father. Ja want the baby to turn into a mutant?’ She disappears down the ditch with the pram. ‘Carmon, Kelly,’ her voice rasps over the edge. ‘We gotta go down in the fallout shelter. The Nazis’ve pushed the button!’

  The child in the dress scrambles after her.

  I am standing on top of a solid sea. Anchorless fridges loll off the ghastly bomboras into yawning cupboardfuls of jetsam. Mast-like standard lamps and broom handles mark the places where valiant articles have foundered. Inner tubes cruise through the mulch like stingrays.

  Where is the safety of the modcon kitchen, purring away on the lino like a satisfied cat? There is the virtue in visiting other people. Why make friends with people worse off than ourselves when we might be in the company of cupboards that really close, seats with the Dunlopillo safely in their cushions, light globes like proud pears securely screwed in over brand-new, frosted-glass, dish-shaped shades?

  As if some huge finger has trailed them out of the morass, five dead ibis lie one after another in a bedraggled line, their pathetic legs haywire. A dog is rolling in one of the corpses. A boy tramps by me, glaring. He has a bucket in his hand. He is blond, gap-toothed, probably the brother. His blue eyes squint. ‘There’s eels in there,’ he hisses at me, pointing at the morass that borders the tip, ‘eels. I’m gunna catch a bucketful of slippery, slimy eeeels. So waddaya starin’ at?’ He pulls a horrible face, reaches into his dilly bag and dangles a piece of putrid meat. ‘Whassa matter, sister? Ya crazy or somefin? Scared?’ He steps before me, brandishing his bait, and I take off like a rat through a living room.

  I can see the top of my father’s head moving through the muck-maze. I scale the foetid hills from the far sides and toboggan down them until I am a mere unsavoury hillock away, and I discover he is talking to someone. I wish for a pair of eyes I could hold up on a stick. Slowly I mount to put a face to the voice that is saying, ‘They’re me kids, little Ernie, ’n Maggie ’n Kelly. I’m the caretaker. Yeah. They give the job to a woman for a change.’

  Woman? This is the most extreme example of the category I have yet witnessed. She is cube-shaped, her brick-red face round as a basketball. Her eyes, when they turn on me, still standing in amazement on my hilltop, are like a punch – bright blue. She is wearing men’s castoffs. Over her shoulder hangs a long flaxen plait. She wears a bayonet through her belt. My father asks what her name is. ‘Bridget Kelly.’ She holds out a chock of a hand and pumps my father up and down until I expect water to spout out of his ears.

  ‘Ya come here often, dontcha? I seen you before.’ She puts her hands on her hips, squinting. ‘Don’t say much, do ya?’ She cocks her head. ‘Pickin’s are better over there. Wanna come and see what I got?’ She leads the way. ‘Y’after hubcaps? I seen ya drive up. Got Holden hubcaps. Got a bumperbar’d probably fit your car. Found ten quid this mornin’ in small change. People throw out anythin’, anythin’ at all. What’s your name?’

  ‘Henry,’ my father says coyly.

  ‘No kiddin’? You’re that painter, aren’t ya?’

  ‘Ye-es,’ sings my father, pensively. ‘H-h-who told you that?’ Dadda has a little way of shuddering his h’s when he wants to know more but isn’t sure it’s polite to ask.

  ‘Everyone knows it. You’re part of the local colour, Henry. I got a friend, Gail. She’s got one of your pitchas in a frame in her sittin’ room. That one of the dame washing the wall. Gail’s got another idea about it, Gail’s deep, ya see – she reckons it’s a pitcha of a dame tryin’ to wash out her shadow. Like the shadow’s a kind of stain we put over everything. That right?’

  ‘Could be,’ Dadda purses his lips and nods seriously.

  ‘Jew believe in ghosts, Henry? Believe in the Afterlife at all?’

  He shakes his head. ‘No-o. I can’t say I do.’

  ‘This dump’s haunted, I’m tellin’ you that much. Anyway, this is me haul for this mornin’.’ She has filled several boxes with junk. ‘It’d be better if I had me metal detector, but I lent it to Big Ernie and he never gave it back.’

  ‘C-c-can you tell me, do you sell this stuff?’ asks Dadda, peering into the boxes.

  ‘Yeah. If you like. But you c’n ’ave whatever you fancy. I don’t make money from friends. Just the bloody fascists, ha ha. You could fix that clock up, it’d go, and the table only wants a leg and a bit of paint. And look what I got here.’ She holds up a white dress, stiff as a board, ‘A weddin’ dress, I reckon. Someone must’ve got sick of it hanging in the wardrobe takin’ up room.’

  My father takes hold of the dress and clouts it out a bit. Slaters run everywhere all over it. ‘Ye-es,’ he says, full of amusement, ‘I will take that.’

  As we are leaving, me, hauling my breaths up in asthmatic resignation, and him, craggy-faced and unimprovable, holding my hand, Bridget Kelly calls out, ‘Bye Henry. I’ll keep me eye out for yer next show.’ I blush to the roots of my hair for the family escutcheon.

  Later I painted eyes, out, on plates. Blue eyes. It was not the first time I strayed from the path towards sedate portraiture and mature renderings of the family bull.

  It was the red of Bridget Kelly’s face that made her eyes so blue. And the tan of Dadda’s face that made his so luscious and so light. If I crawled through the little black hole in Dadda’s eye I would get to Italy. There I would see lakes and ducks and speckled trout, mountains with snow on them and men in Tyrolean hats. There would be girls in blouses, and me, Isobel Euphrosyne, in a dirndl with a lace-up bodice; and the sky would be dad’s-eye blue.

  All that was long ago now; and far from being dad’s-eye blue, the sky today can’t even be discerned. A grey, invading rain has nudged up close to the house. I feel it has been advancing towards me for countless years and over unimaginable terrain, my image on the surface of its shield, till now, thrust up before my gaze, I see myself look over the windowsill as if over the edge of my grave.

  The angles of middle age distort the clean line of my chin. The expression is arch, sardonic, not like me at all.

  On the wall of the kitchen behind me is a large print of Bruegel’s Mad Meg. She is on the rampage, like the past pressing forward, garnering the future into her basket. She is surrounded by catastrophe. Bruegelian eggs crack round her, bringing more catastrophe. She charges from right to left, but catastrophe rises up and falls in all directions. On she charges, on and on eternally, while you and I tumble into the picture plane and ou
t again.

  Somewhere else in the house is an old lady who knits, and if Mad Meg can be likened to History, then she may be likened to Nature, a perpetual knitter. She doesn’t know what she is knitting, she just knits, as long as there are needles, fingers and yarn.

  I have been here sometime now. Other people would find it lonely, I suppose, but for me it is a visual and kinaesthetic paradise, richer far than life among people.

  Until fairly recently, when my work began to absorb me completely, I could think of nothing but someone coming. I craved company. You, whoever you may be, were on the brink of arriving all the time, and in my dreams I was almost always finding you. Now it is different. When I feel the pain of absence weighing on me, like a diver’s belt placed there to stop me from bursting to the surface, I put on music, the Appassionata, Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand, The Rite of Spring, fiery, frantic music that shakes my bones.

  I have laid the books about my father on the walnut table. Whether you come or not, the books will be here waiting. They will tell you the so-called ‘facts’. With facts, you can judge and condemn people, but you can’t rebuild them. The table top is kinder on my face than glass is. Here I look warm and Byzantine, lightly, joyfully and quickly drawn. My father’s eyes were these eyes, blue and slanted, and so were Allegra’s.

  Allegra wore the dress that Bridget Kelly gave my father, and I, a child’s red waistcoat, said to have belonged to Uncle Shaver Motte. On my wrist was a man’s watch given me by Uncle Garth the previous Christmas. The watch had been trodden on by Countess when she threw me. I was the groom in the photo and Allegra, the bride. We loved weddings for all their lascivious mystery.

  We are standing on the front verandah of our house in suburban Melbourne, having made an altar of our chest of drawers by opening the drawers in a staggered tier and filling them to overflowing with our mother’s best underwear and every piece of jewellery we could find.