Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  The public phone at the corner of our street is out of order. ‘We’ll just have to find another one,’ I say. But I can tell Allegra is glad, ringing Macka would be traumatic. Though she’s been going with him all year, his parents don’t know he has a girlfriend. She can’t bring herself to leave a message, so we have to go to the park over the road from his house and loiter until we can attract his attention. Otherwise he’ll turn up tonight and rev the ute in the gutter and no one will come out. We start walking towards Macka’s place, trying to look as though we aren’t hurrying, though we are.

  Boys in our neighbourhood are pretty weak at knocking on the front door. Furthermore, they are scared stiff of Darling Henry, who is not in the general run of fathers and keeps company with the dump woman, Bridget Kelly. They are scared even stiffer of Bridget, who comes calling at our house with specials. I suppose they think they might trip over her and be turned into toads.

  Maggie Kelly started at high school this year and every Monday morning in first term she has had to stand on a bench in front of the assembled school because she hasn’t paid the text book rental fee. Bridget says the fee is illegal because state education is meant to be free.

  We decide to swing back and forth on the double swing opposite Macka’s. Nonchalantly. It’s hot in our beatnik clothes, and we’re supposed to be at home finding something for our mother in our room, so time is limited. Allegra has chickened out at Macka’s gate.

  ‘Leave him a note,’ I tell her, but there’s the problem of no one looking in a letter box on a Saturday afternoon.

  I’m really boiling in this jumper and want to go home, so in the end, I am the one to go up to the gate. In I walk while Allegra gasps, ‘Don’t!’ behind me. Up the four green-painted concrete steps between the dahlias and the postal arrangements I go. From the doorstep I can see Macka’s dad sitting up, polished and beery, in front of the telly. He is watching the tennis as a good dad should: Rod Laver, racquet sinister, droning adulatory commentary delivered by barely moving mouth off camera. I knock boldly three times and something raucous in the way of a dog goes crackers in the hall behind the door.

  Macka’s dad’s beer glass goes thunk on the table. Allegra is standing outside in the street, almost hidden by a tree, picking leaves off the front hedge.

  ‘Gidday’ says Macka’s dad, very ruddy behind the flywire door.

  ‘Gidday,’ I say, ‘Macka home?’

  ‘Yer mean Billy or Terry, love?’

  ‘Um … Terry.’

  ‘No, love. Sorry. ’E’s at the baths.’

  ‘Is he? Um … I want to leave a message from my sister. Her name’s Allegra. Could you tell him she’s sick, but she’ll see him at school on Monday? Okay?’

  ‘Okay, love. Right you are. Nothin’ serious, is it?’

  ‘Um … no, she just fainted. Mum wants her to stay home tonight.’

  ‘Okay, love, she’ll be right. What was the name again?’

  ‘Tell him Legs. Bye.’

  ‘Bye,’ he says, and closes the door.

  I’ve done it. It’s the approach that counts. Nobody puts two and two together if they find adding up difficult. I’m just glad it wasn’t his mum who answered the door.

  Allegra leaps out from behind a tree and grabs me like a maniac. ‘What’d you say?’ she asks. So I tell her. She smiles, a great burden has been lifted from her. She starts to skip, like a woman who has recently recovered from a fainting fit. And sing.

  ‘It’s like I always say,’ I tell her. ‘You gotta have the knack.’

  On the way home we buy a packet of Peter Stuyvesant to practise being sophisticated with in the bedroom.

  The weatherman says clear today, He doesn’t know you’ve gone away, And it’s raining … aining … aining …

  ‘Bugger!’ She kicks the radiogram with her foot. She has taken her shoes and stockings off, her toenails are painted purple. The needle skids onto the next track,

  … blue ’bout, Peggy, My Peggy-Soo-hoo-hoo, Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo, Well I larv you, girl …

  Her foot disappears under a lump of junk on her unmade bed. We have found what we were supposed to be in here looking for half an hour ago. It is a piece of writing by me that our mother is very proud of. She needed it as Exhibit A in her campaign against The Brolga, but it’s too late now, because The Brolga’s gone out the back with Dadda.

  ‘When the archaeologists of the future unearth the 1960s,’ Allegra reads, ‘they will find vast rubbish tips where twentieth-century man sacrificed his chairs, tables and vacuum cleaners to appease the gods. They will think the gods of the twentieth century were middle-class deities who preferred lounge suites to virgins.’

  That’s the bit our mother likes. Allegra lets go a smoke cube and looks at it cross-eyed, just in case. It dribbles down in front of her, holeless. She flaps it away with the pages of my essay and then starts reading out loud again.

  ‘The archaeologists will not realise that twentieth-century rubbish had a mind of its own. It was out to displace human beings.

  ‘In some homes, a great effort was being made to keep it in its place. An entire class of human being, the housewife, yearned for air- and water-tight plastic bags in which to imprison it. Little trucks with cardboard smiles attached to the radiator grilles prowled the suburbs dispensing detergents and toilet sterilisers to fend it off. And there were other trucks, pink- and yellow-striped like the Pied Piper, that sang and sprang around street corners to reward clean little children with cones full of ice-cream. Jawed trucks like dinosaurs called by twice weekly to collect the scourge. But in spite of all this, in one home in deepest darkest Melbourne, rubbish was taking a stand.’

  Despondently, Allegra hands me the weed, filter first. The trick is to draw in until the filter gets hot, then shape up your mouth and bop it out so your tongue makes the hole. I can get five rings off one puff, each new one passing through the one before. We’re using my palette as an ashtray, but Allegra isn’t even very good at ashing and so, when I lift my palette off the floor, it looks like a spatterwork and I have to thump it into the rug so it won’t be noticed.

  Allegra’s bosom is a great disappointment to her. She is in her second-last year at school and will never be a lady now, all hope of grammar school has been abandoned. She is lying back on the bed, staring at the ceiling, tapping her ritzy toes to the music, singing softly and out of tune. She can’t even click her fingers properly, they just make a sort of plap and her dog collar bracelet – ‘Legs and Macka’, hearts entwined – slumps onto her hand.

  We-ell, bee-bop-a-loo-la,

  She’s my baby,

  Bee-bop-a-loo-la

  I don’t mean maybe …

  Aunt Nina won’t want us this Christmas. She didn’t enjoy Jailhouse Rock last year at the Scunthorpe Roxy, even though we explained the good bits to her and told her she didn’t have to come if she didn’t want to. She made us wear gloves. People must’ve thought we had something wrong with our hands. I expect this Christmas we’ll be rearranging the weeds in our own front yard for the benefit of passing boys; that is, if the weeds are still standing. Like the rest of our house, they are in danger of collapse.

  The knobs have fallen off the family stove. The knobs have also fallen off several of the inside doors, so when there’s a draught, you can’t get from one side of the house to the other without having to call someone on the far side to stick in the knob which you heard falling out of reach when the door slammed.

  ’Ain nothin’ but a houn’ dawg,

  Cryin’ all the time.

  ’Ain never caught a rabbit,

  An’ you ain’t no friend of mine.

  And a healthy sprinkle of piano and drum makes the clothes that are sticking out shimmy in the open wardrobe, and sends a shower of lipsticks and false bosoms to the floor from the quaking dressing table. Allegra’s swimsuit falls off her bed with a crash. This piece of apparatus, and another like it which belongs to me, is so stiffly under-girded that it stays facing forwar
d whenever Allegra’s skinny body turns sideways inside it. A hazardous garment, it cannot be lain down supine in for risk of baring what little there is to bare, or prone in for risk of cutting off the circulation.

  The modern head of hair is a thing Aunt Nina desperately wants to put a comb through, but couldn’t if she dared to try, since the top layer is bonded together with lacquer after the fashion of a shell, giving the lie to those foreign languages that insist on the hair being composed of separate entities. If you happen to be unfortunate enough to be caught in the rear by a gale you run the risk of being scalped.

  The most prevalent cause of absenteeism from school is rock’n’roll injuries: feet speared by stiletto heels, backs twisted inside bustiers, rope burns to the knee region from stiffened petticoats, upper leg lacerations from snapped suspenders and permanent bruising and creasing of the waist from embedded hooks and belts.

  Last week we decided to change our names. All the Janes at school are now called Jayne, the Sues are Peggy-Sue and the Margarets are Ann-Margaret, even Coral ‘School’ Mattress is called Cory now. I am known as Hell’s Belle, but Allegra is, as she has always been at school, just Legs.

  ‘Bugger,’ she keeps on saying as gobful after gobful of Peter Stuyvesant fails to develop a central hole.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong-shaped mouth.’

  Her poor mouth is so strained with trying, it’s sending her deaf. With one hand she is droopily netting scum off the goldfish bowl and flicking it out the window. ‘You’d think he could buy her a new stove.’

  ‘He’ is up the back in his studio and so engrossed in his work and The Brolga Laurington he is most unlikely to notice the cigarette smoke billowing out our bedroom windows, which are stuck, through warping, neither up nor down.

  ‘I mean, we must be the only family in Melbourne without a proper stove. And you’d think he could buy her a washing machine.’

  I am tackling the slant on Buddy Holly’s hornrims with my paintbrush. Our bedroom, though by no means as tidy as the Shrine of Remembrance, has become a place of pilgrimage. We entertain on a regular basis in here with ethereal rock’n’roll and contemplation of the Late Great, reconstructed on posters from record covers.

  ‘He’s class conscious,’ I grunt. ‘If you give in to middle-class urges like owning a washing machine that works and having somewhere to plug it in and a couple of taps to attach it to with actual water and electricity coming out the right holes, it’s backsliding. And I would not be a backslider/I’ll tell you the reason why/Cause if I was a backslider, baby/ I wouldn’t be ready to die. And you gotta be ready to die, Legs. What would there be to sing about if everything ran like clockwork? He doesn’t buy her a washing machine because he hasn’t got any money.’

  ‘He could borrow it.’

  ‘There’s his image to protect. You have to starve in a garret or at least stink in a shed for your art.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he get a job or something? I’ve got a job. If I can get a job, so can he.’

  ‘What are you going to wear?’

  ‘Oh God,’ she sighs, smudging the remaining scum into the aquarium glass, ‘she wants me to wear servants’ clothes. I mean, servants’ clothes at my own father’s exhibition?’

  The issue of servants’ clothes is another reason Maggie Kelly has to stand on the bench at school – she hasn’t paid for her sewing materials.

  In First Form the girls are supposed to spend half the year sewing themselves a maid’s uniform to wear in the second half, when they learn cooking. Bridget Kelly says it’s a Hypocritical Practice left over from the old days when girls from our school and others like it were trained for domestic service. Bridget Kelly is proud that she is the only woman in the state of Victoria, probably in the whole of Australia, who is caretaker of a dump. Special regulations have had to be passed in the City Council just to describe her position. She is a Live-in Caretaker, Grade Two (female).

  I join Allegra at the window, where she is using her reflection to metamorphose from a beatnik to a widgie by putting on white lipstick and teasing her hair. It being Saturday, the blind on the studio window is up and we can see inside. The Brolga Laurington is perched on one of Dadda’s high stools, distributing a fortnight’s gush and warble with her hands, even though it is only two days since she was last here. Mum was at work then.

  ‘Do you reckon Dadda’s a “sort”?’ asks Allegra.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘She looks as though he’s tickling her. Maybe he’s got a feather tied to a piece of wire and he’s running it up the insides of her legs. She’s got a very stuck-up laugh. I don’t think she’s the sort who would climb down the social ladder gracefully, do you? I mean, she’s probably “got an eye” for things that are stirring at the bottom of the social handbag and might keep her climbing upwards …’

  ‘She’d better keep her claws off Dadda.’

  ‘Duck! They’re coming out!’

  Under the windowsill we can hear the scraping of the studio door on the floor planks. I bop a ring through a ring through a ring.

  I sit there with Allegra on the floor, the pair of us now dressed in black with black eyes and white lips, bopping smoke rings into our zoo of a room – not only do we have a moribund fish tank, but we also have a caged Peach Face called Leone in memory of ant-bitten Leone who has gone to London to seek her fortune, a white mouse endlessly fleeing in a rotating wheel, a grey cat called Silk and a pug called Botticelli.

  During afternoon tea, our mother had dropped the creamcake she’d baked specially. It broke in two on the floor. She proceeded, while The Brolga Laurington trumpeted and trilled in controlled fashion, to pick it up again, put it back on the plate and dollop more cream goodnaturedly over the crack. Then The Brolga had repaired to the studio with Dadda and the removal of the last bits and pieces for the exhibition from the studio to the Daimler took place. And after that, the extended chat with the window wide open so our mother could see the entire action. Everything had an aura of Saturday innocence about it. Nasal phrases sailed through the air to the flicking of the silver bangles on the Laurington wrist. Dadda’s voice was shady cool behind them.

  ‘Old bitch,’ says Legs from her possie in the past, ‘ten bob for a whole night’s work. It stinks.’

  She has to hand out drinks and savouries.

  ‘Girls …’ Mum’s head has appeared around the bedroom door. She sees us and gasps. Her eyes do a quick circuit of the room, her nostrils flare, she glares. ‘Mrs Laurington is going now. Won’t you come and say goodbye?’

  Allegra sidles off her bed with a groan. Standing behind our mother in the next room, Checkie, who has grown tall and wears frocks, is trying to avoid touching anything in case something should come off and damage her.

  The Brolga and Darling Henry are in the sitting room, all smiles.

  ‘Such a talented family, darling,’ The Brolga glubs and practically kisses our mother’s face off. ‘And Al-le-gra.’ But Legs turns her face away just in time to deflect the kiss and leave me out of danger of copping it. I dash to the far side of the couch.

  ‘Well, bye-bye, Allegra. See you tonight. Such shy little things, Stella, so pretty.’

  ‘Say goodbye to Checkie, girls,’ says our mother with narrowed eyes.

  ‘Goodbye, Checkie,’ we drawl in unison, so shy, so pretty, flicking bodgie chains around our fingers. Our mother can’t wait to get her hands on us and wring our necks.

  The poor old Midnight Knitter couldn’t settle down because a man in shortie pyjamas came and stood outside her security door, and when she asked him, ‘What are you doing there?’ he said, ‘What do you think?’ The cheek! Proper men wear proper pyjamas, flannelette. And they put on a tie when they go visiting.

  She is brewing coffee in the kitchen under the print of Mad Meg. Alongside her is a large, ornate Chinese lantern. Reg Sorby, the man who owns this house, made us a present of it months ago when we came here. One of his girlfriends left it behind. It’s hard to imagine how you could �
�leave behind’ a lantern half the size of the average laundry, but there we are. Reg is not subtle, so there’s no reason to suppose his girlfriends are.

  He knows our story in the way a rich man knows anything, always requiring his opinion to prevail. For all that I like him and stand in his debt, he does not understand about Allegra or Mad Meg and I expect he never will. Mad Meg was our gallery. We bought it with our ‘inheritance’. ‘Why didn’t you buy up art?’ Reg wants to know. The fact is we had other ideas and other hopes, but men, and particularly rich men, need to have the final say; our ideas and our hopes are silverfish in the closets of their minds.

  It would be comforting to be able to travel backwards through time and undo its kinks. But I wonder if an exposure of what was yet to come, issued by the fifteen-year-old Isobel in the sitting room where all the protagonists gathered after Dadda and Viva Laurington emerged from his studio, I wonder if the future had been foretold, even convincingly, whether postures would have changed. Would a condescending Brolga face have taken on a more sympathetic expression? Would a recognisably Mottean face, over which expressions traipsed in a continuous pantomime, buffoon to beauty queen, angel to arquebusier, have settled down? Would the dad’s-eye blue eyes of the daughters have kept the glance arrows back from where they pinged off the bejewelled Brolga and pipped off Checkie Laurington, so that sight vibrations filled the room with opinion, and stances and attitudes were formed? Would the mystery man have stood forth and said enough is enough, instead of standing off to one side grinding his thumbs and letting his quiet gaze wander through the field of mothers and daughters all hostilely arrayed? I doubt it. There’s a script written sotto voce that we all obey.