Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  Wednesday Monday had inherited his pub laterally from a pair of aged aunts, ‘relicts’, as he called them, of a no-good husband and brother. Wednesday was a lawyer – the aunts had put him through Sydney University – but he’d never practised, because, he said, he couldn’t bear to wear shoelaces and they were de rigueur in public courts. He was perennially cheerful, sat in the pub all day ‘ready to spring’, as he called his overwound appearance, but he never drank anything. Every now and again he had to wear dark glasses to ease the eye strain from being awake all the time.

  We came to be such good friends that sometimes he’d come on the student rampages with me and we’d leave someone else in charge. The rampage was a circuit through people’s rooms and houses to gallery openings and parties. I noticed that whenever I was introduced, people knew the name. ‘Coretti,’ they would say, their eyebrows shooting up their faces. And then they sang, ‘Oh,’ an invitation to say yes, I was his daughter.

  One who sang it had grown a Van Dyke beard to distract attention from the nose he had broken as a bantamweight boxing champion in the fifties. His eyes were two grey glitters in asterisks of mirth. His S’s sizzled and he hurdled his adjectives with long, bounding vowels. His name was Bart Turner. He had a gallery; his primary interests were the young and the new. Of courssse he could help me. And hadn’t I better phone my mother? He’d phone my mother. Then and there. She must be worried sssick. Though it was the middle of someone’s launch, he was asking the exchange to put him through to my mother’s number in Melbourne before he had finished talking to me.

  ‘Hullo, Stella? Stella, you won’t remember me. I’m calling from Sydney. The name’s Bart Turner. I met you once at Horrible Laurington’s … Yes, I know. I know. They came swanning through here on their way to wherever it was they were going. Sssick! But I don’t want to talk to you about that. I’ve got your daughter here … No, she hasn’t been taken by the white slave trade. It’s much much simpler than that … Yes, ye-es. Well, I don’t have to tell you, then, do I, since you’ve already guessed correctly? Well, what I was ringing to say was, it’s quite all right if she stays in Sydney. She’s got a room and a job in a pub … Well, it’s a students’ haunt, Stella, I don’t think there’s much risk of that, and anyway, Isobel doesn’t look like a prostitute, she wouldn’t be likely to do a roaring trade either, in her condition. Anyway, what I rang to say was, we can look after her … Well, there’s not much risk of that, either, Stella, I’m forty years old and my friend Len wouldn’t like it … Look, I’ll take her along to Crown Street myself … Well, I suppose that’s up to Isobel to decide.

  ‘Going to keep it?’ he mouthed, his hand over the receiver. I nodded. ‘Well, at this stage, the answer’s yes, Stella … I quite agree … Me too.’ He handed me the phone. ‘She wants a word with you.’

  ‘Keep it, darling, keep it!’ she cried. ‘I’d be looking into prams for the rest of my life!’

  And so the fate of Eli the Unexpected was sealed. And so was my fate, and so, though we didn’t know it at the time, was the fate of Allegra.

  Bart Turner came and stood with me in the prenatal mother’s line until a sister told him fathers weren’t wanted and he went away.

  Yellow cards in a plastic folder. White booklet. Orange plastic seats in the middle of the grey-cream waiting room. A system of wood veneer cupboards along one wall. These were the consulting rooms. I was to go and sit on the orange seats after seeing the nursing bra sister. Obviously I had done the right thing. Nobody came racing out to question me more closely. If I played it right nobody would come and dispossess me of the baby when the time came.

  The nursing bra sister had no teeth. She came in three sections, shoe’d shanks, white uniformed thighs and the rest of her, white veiled and blue-cardiganed. The sections were arranged slant-wise on a chair. She knew her product, could tell a good pair of nipples at a hundred paces and recommended, at the price of a guinea, the lace-up Hilton rather than the clip-front Berlei for a bust as young as mine.

  As she gave me my fitting, ‘Gawd,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing much to fit.’

  I went and sat on the orange chairs and felt the laces on my nursing bra slip and get stuck under my rib cage. I remembered the dirndl and bodice I had dreamed of in my youth and opened Allegra’s letter.

  She wrote to say she had taken a job.

  Thanks for the shoes. I particularly like the ones with the Mercury wings on the heels. I’ve just thought of a design for ones with FJ Holden fronts. I got a job in Newman College serving breakfast to the boys. Fat sausages, greasy bacon and rubber eggs. A couple of days ago I shot a monseigneur with a sausage that slipped out of the tongs. Got him fair in the bib. To think I got my inaugural waitress training from The Brolga!

  The only females you ever see in Newman dining hall are drudges like me, there isn’t even a picture of Mary. They say it’s the same in Trinity and Ormond, and, of course, there are no pictures of Mary there. It gives me a bad feeling, really really bad, so bad I always make sure I serve things up with lashings of fat, so they’ll die of heart attacks.

  A very reverend gentleman told me he didn’t think my footwear was altogether suitable, but I pointed out that I was not wearing thongs and nor did my shoes have open toes through which the scalding porridge might plop, and thus, they met the union regulations. The reverend gentleman was nonplussed. Then someone whispered in his ear the magical words ‘Henry Coretti’, and presto! all objections to my footwear were swept aside and a special cordiality has set in. Now I serve on high table. Oh, Lucky Me!

  Be it said that it was not I who revealed my paternity, but another very senior reverend gentleman with an Italian-sounding name. Meanwhile the exceptionally reverend Cardinal Mannix watches proceedings from his spot on the wall, while I serve the sausages under the pope’s nose opposite, humming ‘Underneath the Arches’ all the while.

  When asked by the very senior reverend gentleman why I hum this particular song, I pointed out the arches of the dining hall. They’re wonderful. They make the ceiling into a dome.

  Walter Burley Griffin must have liked goblins and trolls – everything in Newman is snug and strong, even the chairs he designed to go with his architecture. It’s like being under the roots of a great big tree. God’s tree. It only sees fit to shelter the male of the species.

  An occasional pipe is taken at high table during the clearing away of the plates. Recently there was talk of a dog being found in a student’s bed. I suppose he mistook it for a girl on his way upstairs in the dark.

  I hope you are eating your greens.

  I was having lunch with Wednesday Monday in the Greasy Spoon when they went past. Arm in arm down Darlinghurst Road. Dadda and Viva Laurington. Eli the Unexpected decided he’d had enough cooped up under the lace-up bra and the rib cage. It was time to decamp. The waters broke and Wednesday called a cab.

  Eli was frowning when he was born and I can’t say I blame him.

  EIGHT

  If

  WHEN ELI WAS born it took two days for the interested parties to find us. We’d been whisked away from Crown Street, where the action was, to the tip of Darling Point, where the impecunious mothers recuperated in a splendour so out of keeping with their social status that the wards were designed to face away from Sydney Harbour, lest the view overwhelm them and make them forget themselves.

  If Arnie Russell had been the mother of Eli Coretti and not the father, he would have been given a quilted coathanger by the rich ladies from St Mark’s Church of England, Darling Point, while he was having a sun lamp shone on his stitches. If Arnie had been the mother, not the father, he would have waited in the queue for the toilet in a gingham nightie, bent at the waist and calculating how to perform his offices without disturbing the doctor’s needlework. If Arnie Russell had been Eli’s mother, he would have had to think up white lies about where the father was to tell the three mothers who shared his ward. The father was in California.

  When Eli was born, he had to b
e called something. There was a Jasmin in the ward, a Stewart and a Stephen. If Arnie Russell had been Eli’s mother, he would have wondered how these names were arrived at. He would have looked at the baby’s caved-in face and his pulsating head with its tufts of hair like the Devil’s horns, and been bewildered. Suddenly, his chest would have swelled up to three times its accustomed size and he would have found himself bathed in milk. He would have had to shake the milk out of his newborn baby’s nose and towel it out of his ears. He would have had a sister come with a breast pump and been milked so that babies with dry mothers could share in the bonanza. But he, unfortunately, was in California.

  Wednesday Monday would have brought him a packet of nipple protectors and a horn with a rubber bulb for the baby’s stroller. He would have heard Bart Turner laughing at the baby’s hair horns outside the viewing window. And then he would have received a shock.

  Because it was not Bart Turner who put his head around the door of the ward, making the mothers of Jasmin and Stewart and Stephen gasp in surprise at his sartorial magnificence, and making the mother of the as-yet-unnamed Eli cry out, ‘Dadda!’

  When Dadda came to see his grandson, he came in his grandfatherly outfit, a double-breasted cherry-red coat with vertical blue and white stripes, black and white inch-by-inch check trousers. Dress shirt with lace frill front. Long hair and sideburns to mid-ear, but his face was hairless. He came bearing gifts – a pillar-box red Mary Quant helmet from London, a packet of madeleines from Paris and an ounce of very special tea. The madeleines were still quite fresh.

  If Arnie Russell had been Eli’s mother, he would have sat up in bed in tears and a Mary Quant helmet, drinking lapsang souchong and eating madeleines with a dissolute reprobate who, rendered down, wouldn’t have yielded enough glue to stick on a postage stamp. Hopelessly fond of the man, he would have eaten more than his fair share of the madeleines, partly out of gluttony and partly out of having nothing much to say and therefore playing the rule of not speaking with one’s mouth full. But Arnie was in California and I had to do all these things for him.

  ‘Well,’ said Dadda presently, ‘how was the birth? Did you stay awake all through it?’

  I nodded my head and stuffed my face. ‘It was like poohing a football,’ I managed when the silence extended into the post-swallow period.

  ‘Really? I must say that’s a fine description for it. Those in the know, however, tell me there is a …’ Dadda makes a tulip of his hand, ‘… sublime moment at the actual moment, as it were.’

  I put two madeleines in at once and suppressed the urge to say it no doubt depended on whether or not the baby had fuzzy hair like Checkie Laurington’s. I managed at length to say, ‘I never thought I’d get to like lapsang souchong, Dadda. I used to think you and Mum were mad sitting up there having lapsang souchong parties. But I think I’m beginning to understand.’

  ‘And … and …’ Dadda screwed his face into an expression of concern, ‘how,’ he sipped, ‘is …?’ He cocked his eyebrow.

  ‘Allegra is very well, Dadda, thank you. She has taken a job as a kitchen maid to defray costs. I, of course, am a barmaid.’

  ‘Now, now, you know I meant …’

  ‘Your wife?’

  ‘Ye-es.’

  I stuffed in another madeleine and semaphored so-so. I wanted to say give me your address and phone number and you might find out, but I could see Bart Turner standing in the doorway of the ward behind Dadda and he winked at me. Address and phone number were probably all under control.

  ‘Well, w-w-what are you going to call the baby?’ Dadda asked in a rising tone, as if I would, of course, have an answer to that one.

  ‘How did you arrive at our names?’ I said. ‘You’ve had more practice at this kind of thing than I have.’

  ‘Well, yes, now you mention it. We had a funny time finding a name for Allegra. Your mother wanted to call her Belinda, but your silly old Granpa said, Oh, you can’t do that, Daught, too German. Berlinda. So we called Allegra after my mother, instead. I’m surprised you didn’t know that.’

  ‘I didn’t even know you had a mother, Dadda.’

  ‘Well, darling I wasn’t found under a cabbage leaf, you know. My parents got up to the same sort of pranks your mother and I got up to, the same sort of pranks you and … Tell me, darling, this isn’t a virgin birth, is it?’

  The question made me cry a good deal harder. Dadda put his arms around me and soothed. ‘There, there,’ he said. ‘There, there, Sibella. Did he run away?’ I nodded; my hair creaked on his gaudy coat sleeves. ‘Mustn’t worry.’ He held me back so he could look into my face. ‘Bart tells me you’ve been doing some very clever paintings. Ye-es. He’s going to put them in a show for you.’ He sat beside me on the high hospital bed, then suddenly rolled back and pulled me onto his chest.

  I beat him with my fists. ‘You’re so cruel, Dadda! So cruel!’ I cried.

  ‘I tell you what.’ He sat up. ‘Let’s play a game. I’ve got the toe of my shoe stuffed with Scrabble letters.’ He took his shoe off and held it up in the air. ‘Pick a letter,’ he said, ‘and whatever you pick will be part of the baby’s name.’

  I drove my hand down the length of his yellow shoe. ‘Yellow?’ I asked him.

  ‘I bought them in Carnaby Street,’ he said.

  ‘There are only three letters in this shoe cap, Dadda.’

  ‘Oh, are there? Are there really? There ought to be five.’

  ‘L. I. E.’

  ‘Oh dear, I wonder what happened to the F and the X. I thought it was so auspicious, too. I found them on a bus seat in New Beach Road yesterday.’

  ‘Fixel? Fexil? They’re terrible names, Dadda.’

  ‘Felix, darling. It’s Latin for happy.’

  ‘You wouldn’t catch me calling a son of mine Felix, Dadda. And I can’t call him Lie; he’s a fact.’

  ‘Well, call him Eli, carissima.’

  Eli the Unexpected.

  Eli the taciturn.

  Eli the stern, who, if he could have spoken would have recited a long list of newborn baby’s rights. He had drawn a bead on each of us as he lay waiting in his amniotic world.

  I had been reading Lawrence Durrell when Eli was born. I thought the world was going to turn into an imitation Alexandria and I would learn what some of Durrell’s similes meant – how could Justine’s profile be ‘lit by a painful academic precision’, for instance? On paper I could get ‘academic precision’ into women’s faces, but I couldn’t for the life of me make it painful. Among the young women I knew, the academically inclined positively revelled in their superiority. ‘Academic hauteur’ was the closest I could come to pain – a kind of affected pain which no doubt was deeply pleasurable to the wearer.

  I thought the world would continue along the road towards Turkish sobranis for breakfast and away from tea and cornflakes. I had only melted one telephone table with the Birko and was prepared to melt more in my search for the perfect cup of black coffee. But the search was cut short. I was in error. The world into which Eli was born was not imitation Alexandria. It was imitation London.

  The drink was Nescafé. The cigarettes were Benson and Hedges. I felt cheated. It had all been going on behind my back. When I arrived home in Melbourne, Allegra was sucking in her cheeks, pouting and walking pigeon-toed. She was shoving her curly hair into berets and hats. When she tried to iron it straight, she burnt an ear. In the end she had the front part straightened and cut à la Quant and left the long, incorrigible back long and incorrigible. She wore men’s jeans and skinny rib jumpers. She wore boots. What she wouldn’t wear was the stripy tie, the lace blouse and bracered mini skirt Dadda had bought for her in Chelsea. She wouldn’t let me wear the ones he’d bought for me, either. The Brolga had probably chosen them, she said.

  She was steeping herself in Comrade Marx. She laughed at Lawrence Durrell and said I was living in a dream world. Furthermore, art should be demotic, a word I’d come across in Justine, which I at first thought was a misprint fo
r demonic, though demonic was an odd adjective to go with Greek.

  Newman College banned her for joining a political club that spurned the Newman Society and had as its slogan: More Concerned with Kafka than Wordsworth. She was spoken to for wearing jeans in a certain lecture hall on campus. ‘Fuck them,’ she said. Our mother was stunned. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ Allegra repeated, ‘it’s only a word.’

  She was very bad tempered. ‘You know nothing,’ she said to me, ‘just nothing.’ All the same, she was good to me. She took me out on Saturday nights to the pub where her friends gathered. Her ex-boyfriend, Macka, had been called up for the army in 1964, but was rejected because of acne on the back. Now he was a photojournalist. He practised fashion shots, the ‘in’ thing, on Eli and me. The model in those days wore her legs as if striding and stuck her bottom lip out. Allegra was above this capitalistic nonsense, but not beyond wearing the clothes.

  Out of teenage sloth was born an angry brilliance – there’s a Durrell sentence for you – but by brilliance I don’t mean being able to quote Marx verbatim, nor do I mean that she’d been dousing her eyeballs, à la Justine, in belladonna. Marx’s prose style left a lot to be desired, I decided, in the midst of her long harangues. It was her delivery and the animation it imparted to her that made her brilliant.

  She was little, fabulously pretty and inspiring. Whatever she’d said, the legions would have followed her. Most of us didn’t know what she was talking about, perhaps she didn’t know herself particularly, except that there was something wrong, and she made us feel it.

  Something was wrong, but not everything was dreary.

  She has been invited to be among the first women to sit at high table at Trinity College. She has assembled herself a suitable costume for the occasion. Jodhpurs, she feels, teamed with long brown riding boots left over from Stella’s youth. A navy blue Voluntary Aid Detachment overcoat with a Red Cross on the sleeve and captain’s stripes. Military buttons. Stella isn’t sure. In the first place, we thieved the coat from Clare on the recent trip we took to show Aunt Nina Eli. (Babies have the same sort of effect on Nina as the Bible had on Granpa. She didn’t criticise, though she would have preferred a girl and was clearly pleased the baby was mine rather than Allegra’s.)