The Melbourne gulls may or may not be in the projected flight paths of DC7s which are about to take off from the just-opened International Airport of Melbourne at Tullamarine.
The collective notes, with considerable scorn, that despite a brand spanking new freeway from the city centre to the very airport doors, sightseers on Day One caused a traffic jam that lasted from nine o’clock in the morning till seven o’clock at night.
And anyway, the swamp is miles from Tullamarine, so why are certain burghers of the City of Melbourne being asked to take their pick between Annihilation and Poisoning? One or two of them have already taken their pick and also their mattock to the encroachment from the east and done some damage to progress under cover of night. But they are no match for governmental bullshit. All the complainants can hope for is a stay of execution. Just now, execution is staying. It is lounging in orange jerkins beside the billabong while mosquitoes sting it, rabbits burrow into its towering sides and Annihilation does battle with Poison for the upper hand.
The blood of the Kelly–Coretti faction of the Mad Meg collective is up. Canvas is being unrolled in imagination down the hall of this house. Allegra is mixing paint. The canvas is rolled up again when the art historian, a Catholic from our local diocese (and our natural ally), thinks she can get us cut-price calico from the mercery section of her dad’s emporium. But will the paint take on the calico? Maggie Kelly mentions a circus tent currently on offer to the Pantechnicon. We could cut it up with Big Ernie Kelly’s electric saw, but that seems excessive. We debate canvas and calico. Calico wins because it’s lighter to carry; the letters can be silk-screened on.
An interruption. Eli, who sleepwalks, wanders into the kitchen with his bear under his arm. He opens the door of the saucepan cupboard, pees inside it, closes the door and goes back to bed. The Kelly–Coretti faction has hysterics. Saucepans are hastily doused and the cupboard cleansed of the offending liquid.
During this unexpected occurrence, the Nouveau Proletariat regroups and the question of lead poisoning from car exhausts is raised. The Nouveau Proletariat consists of the three critics, all of whom went to school with Checkie Laurington.
And then (between haughty cigarette puffs) there’s the cost of double-glazing the houses at the freeway outlet. These are nice little single-fronted Victorian houses, one of which is owned by a member of the Nouveau Proletariat. Shouldn’t we widen our agenda?
Maggie Kelly ponders lead poisoning and double-glazing and raises the fact that Mad Meg and the Pantechnicon have withstood the effluent from bumper-to-bumper traffic since traffic became bumper-to-bumper and if the freeway were to take the proposed alternate route, the route which would take it to the nice little Victorian cottages, the aforementioned would in fact be better off than they are now.
This information is not received kindly by the Nouveau Proletariat, which uncurls itself from its superior sulky poses, raises its languid brows and plumps its hair, or cleans the long fingernails of its left hand with its thumbnail, or sighs and expostulates, ‘Look, either we’re serious or we’re not. If we’re serious, then lead poisoning and double-glazing are issues.’
‘I would have thought public transport was,’ retorts the Catholic art historian.
‘That’s being smug,’ says the fingernail cleaner.
Our collective is split along class lines.
Maggie Kelly, who has taken the cutlery out of our sink and is sitting on the draining board washing her feet, says, ‘And that’s a put-down.’
‘Oh God,’ says the hair-plumper, looking at her watch, ‘is that the time?’
And so the dust is swept behind the door. All the fags are smoked. It’s time to go home. The Nouveau Proletariat kisses. It is something we have to get used to. Maggie Kelly, who is not kissed, plants a book with a brown paper cover in Allegra’s hands before she stomps off into the night.
The Pantechnicon has had a recent boost to its trade. A goodly portion of the 71 000 copies of Portnoy’s Complaint not seized by the vice squad (400 languish in custody) has come into the possession of the Kellys. All over Melbourne, in trams and buses, trains and toilets, the book with the brown paper cover is being read. The populace is up to its neck in smut.
As we close the door on Maggie and decamp into the murky interior of our house, Allegra says, ‘I wonder if I like those women.’
‘Wonder? It’s plain to see what they’re like.’
‘Is it? Or are they a threat to you?’ She cartwheels effortlessly down the hall, our mock-croc boots like a pair of hedge trimmers lopping off a branch.
‘Noight,’ she says from halfway up the stairs.
I retire, fuming, to my rumpled, Arnie-less bed. A streetlight shines through the leadlight, casting coloured patterns on the walls. Silk comes in through the window, her shadow tiger-sized. She curls up behind my knees, purring and kneading a nest for herself.
Allegra knows the Nouveau Proletariat from university. I feel, I know, in my heart of hearts that these are people whose only concern is what they look like and whom they’re seen with. Allegra Coretti has been queen of the campus. Being Henry’s daughter only strengthens her appeal in the eyes of her followers. For these people, politics is a form of high fashion. They are the antithesis of Maggie Kelly, whose politics are those of experience. As for Allegra, she marches with the candour and grace of a saint. Others stride, but Allegra strolls. Others are angry, but Allegra is radiant. It’s strange to think that she once was too scared to go and leave a message with her boyfriend’s father. She’s magnificent now: small, but lithe, her hair is a buoyant, electric mass. Life moves through her like a seal through water.
THIRTEEN
The Politics of Kite-Flying and the Elusiveness of Cash
WHEN ELI WENT to school, his attitude towards his clothes was cavalier. On his first day he lost a shirt and a shoe. I had to take him aside and tell him that now he was at school, he must remember school clothes cost much more than dressing-up clothes. Shoes, in particular, were expensive items. The next day he came home with three left shoes and a shirt I’d never seen before, into which you could have stuffed two Elis. I pointed out that all the shoes he’d brought home were for the same foot. Didn’t his right foot feel strange in a left shoe? ‘No,’ he said, ‘it feels bourgeois.’ Bourgeois was his expression for terrific. He’d spent his lunch money on them; they’d come from the lost property box. He’d bought three shoes so he’d have one in reserve.
I sewed name tags into everything, but it wasn’t long before there wasn’t an item of school clothing with his name on it. Friday was my day to pick the children up. I enquired of his teacher just why it was that my son’s uniform kept changing. Surely it wasn’t that he stripped off every day? This boy whose ambition it was to grow up Normal?
‘Oh, he’s not normal,’ said Mrs Hildebrand. ‘Children have to pay a ten-cent fine for losing clothes. I put him in charge of the lost property box. He holds up the contents of the box piece by piece every afternoon, but nobody knows who owns what at this age and a lot of the stuff remains unclaimed, so he buys it, ten cents an item. I make him bring things back if a parent complains, and he’s not allowed to take things that are clearly marked.’
‘Well, what’s he done with his own clothes?’
‘No idea. If I send Eli to run a message, he comes back looking quite different from when he left. He’s not normal, dear, whatever gave you the idea he was normal? He’s one of the funniest children I’ve ever taught. Someone told me he was Henry Coretti’s grandchild. Is he?’
‘Yes, he is. Henry’s my father.’
‘Is your father eccentric?’
‘Yes. I suppose he is.’
‘Well, then, that’ll be where it comes from.’
‘My mother’s eccentric too.’
‘Oh yes, I’ve seen your mother. That very handsome woman who drives the Daimler. I envy her that beautiful sable coat.’
‘Think of all the poor little creatures who died so it could be made.
I wouldn’t be surprised if she went out and killed them all personally.’
‘You don’t get on?’
‘That person is not my mother. And most especially, she is not my son’s grandmother.’
Normal Eli might not have been, but he hankered in his own way for conformity, and did things like bring men home for me to marry. The first was a cyclops.
Eli had taken his affairs in hand and joined the Church of England Boys who met for games after school on Tuesdays. The cyclops, sweaty after basketball, would bring him home. Because this was something of a kindness, I felt I had to make him a cup of coffee. Then he began to bring his chess set. Despite my best efforts to be checkmated in the minimum number of moves, he was slow to leave on Tuesday evenings, one cup of coffee might now and then stretch to four. Eli could be heard singing happy songs in the bath, ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah’, and ‘Love, love me do’. Since I was such an excellent loser, the cyclops came up with the game of suicide chess in which she who is checkmated first is the winner.
While Allegra was upstairs editing Mad Meg’s news sheet, I was downstairs perpetrating, and indeed perpetuating, the faults and follies against which the news sheet railed. If I did not perpetrate and perpetuate I was afraid my son would have to give up basketball, which he loved and was very good at.
When he turned seven he took up philately on alternate Thursday nights, and began to bring home a stamp-loving but deserted father. This sorrowful being, who had balefulness down to an even finer art than my mother had, sought to increase the range of his chaperonage and to include within it the unoccupied side of my bed, so that on alternate Thursday nights I was forced to institute a life drawing class in the empty sitting room where some artist friends and I would gather around the naked Bridget Kelly and draw her from the left, from the right, with feet facing or with head.
The chaperone would come in after stamps and drink coffee sorrowfully by the sitting-room wall. He and Bridget knew each other from being on the Parents and Friends of the local school together. Bridget, often in a most indecorous pose, would yell out such choice morsels as, ‘Is that fucker Brannigan still the president?’ ‘Yes,’ the baleful chaperone would go. ‘Needs his balls put through a mangle. What about that bitch, McIver, she still the secretary?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Geez, nothin’ changes.’ If he hadn’t gone by ten, we gave him a stick of charcoal and a drawing pad on which to work off his frustrations.
Around about this time, Eli decided to be christened. Since his mother had not taken charge of his affairs and he was already seven years old, a list of potential godparents was submitted and I was required to choose. I could not. Needless to say, in my wanderings I did not come across many Anglicans; almost all persons of my acquaintance belonged to the Atheist persuasion, though there were a few Muslims at the gardens. Apart from conducting a doorknock, I could think of no way of bagging an Anglican. Eli suggested we stand outside a church on a Sunday. This seemed a good idea, so Allegra and I dressed obscurely in hats and mingled round the church door Eli had pointed out to us as the one belonging to his boys’ club. As the congregation issued out after the sermon, we realised we had made a mistake. It was several years since the hat was popular garb among Anglicans and our hats were of the large, floppy, Mavis Bramston kind. They were black and we were wearing dark glasses to save ourselves from being noticed. Everyone noticed us. The vicar bolted for the vicarage even though Eli, dressed in long trousers, a shirt and tie, was lounging on the low bluestone wall just outside the church and waved to him. Eli had taken his grandmother shopping for suitable Sunday attire. It was Eli who darted into the crowd of parishioners, bagged his Anglican and brought her back to us. She was, we discovered, the organist, and Eli had worked his blue-eyed magic on her.
She was tall, blonde and blushing and the owner of standard blues herself. Her name was Belinda Bloomfield. Perfect. As for a godfather, because I had refused all Eli’s suggestions, Allegra said she’d be it.
On the day of the christening, we were sitting in our kitchen and I had just told Belinda the joke about Berlin-da when she blushed brilliantly, gasped and an elegant hand flew to her bosom. She was staring, bewitched, at the kitchen doorway. It was Dadda, resplendent in velvet. He was carrying Eli and in his free hand he had a Black Forest torte.
Allegra stood up immediately, turned her back on him and stared fixedly at the fridge. Dadda put the cake on the table and stood between Allegra and the door so that when she went to rush past him, Eli and Dadda gathered her in. She started to cry. Dadda and Eli sat her at the table, Dadda keeping his arm around her and Eli staying on his lap. I introduced him to Belinda Bloomfield, who, had she been a Christmas tree, would have burst into flames.
‘I like Eli’s suit, Sibella. He cuts a very fine dash. Is it a special occasion, then?’
‘My christening,’ said Eli.
‘Oh, then a very special occasion, it’s just as well I brought a cake. You can eat it to celebrate.’ He kissed Allegra’s forehead, then said to Eli, ‘Well, then, if you’re being christened I mustn’t hold you up, must I?’
‘That’s right, Dadda, piss off,’ sobbed Allegra. Dadda was about to do just that when a white handkerchief on the end of a broom handle was fluttered round the door. It disappeared and our mother, in her christening robes, materialised in the doorway. It was her first visit to our house since the Mad Meg war began.
‘Heck,’ she said, then to me, with narrowed eyes, ‘To whom do we owe this honour?’
It was clear that Belinda Bloomfield had rarely, if ever, witnessed a scene of this type, but one thing was for certain, when she set her eyes on Dadda, it was love. She was heard to mutter, ‘Lord! I didn’t think they made them like that in the flesh.’ Then she sprang to her feet, looking at her watch and saying, ‘Lord, it’s getting late.’ The Lord was figuring prominently on this holiest of days.
Then Stella said, as if nothing had changed in a decade and Dadda were requiring a part in a pantomime. ‘Well, Dadda, we haven’t got a father-in-law.’
‘You mean godfather,’ snapped Allegra, blowing her nose. ‘I’m going to be godfather. Come if you’re coming, Dadda. Go if you aren’t.’
Dadda came. His presence was such a shock all round that when we arrived at the church we couldn’t find Eli, so Dadda had to go back and look for him. The vicar tried to take it all in his stride. The other christenees were babies. Eli, having had a trouser leg caught up in the bike chain, skidded up on his bike sporting a chocolate goatee. Dadda, looking sheepish in the daisy and dream-strewn Kombi, arrived just after him.
It only took about ten minutes for Eli to be christened and we were invited to repair to Belinda Bloomfield’s for afternoon tea. Dadda said he had to go. ‘Where are you going?’ I yelled, but he was already gone, hurtling away in a taxi, away, away, and but for the signature on the christening certificate forced out of him by Eli, I would have said I’d dreamed him being there.
When we went to collect the Black Forest torte from the kitchen table, we found that some sinner had hacked a piece from it.
It was a day of coincidences. Belinda Bloomfield lived in splendour by the Yarra. A house with a garden of magnolias, rhododendrons and camellias, and a double garage, was not the sort of house into which a Coretti foot would normally stir, but on this occasion, as we mounted the stair to the picture-windowed sitting room, a voice already in there breathed, ‘Bunny Motte.’
The response was, ‘Baby Beauchamp.’ Our mother’s cousin’s daughter.
The last time Baby Beauchamp had seen Bunny Motte was in 1942 when Hitchcock’s Rebecca hit the Scunthorpe Roxy, so it was an attestation to our mother’s youthfulness that Baby Beauchamp/ Bloomfield could still recognise her and a remarkable feat of her own memory to have named her Beauchamp at ten paces, when the last time they’d met, Baby had been twelve years old.
The family flower beds were dug, but with some caution, we noticed. The dead were resurrected, the living were reported on and the likenesses of th
e young to the old, both in feature and in habit. Scant but dignified reference was made to Bunny’s three brothers, lost in the war. And to Geoffrey Latimer, her fiancé, what a shame, he would have been … oh well. Baby Beauchamp stood and exercised her spine by making chick wings of her elbows, her face displaying an implacability Nina would have been proud of. She removed the crumb-blighted and cream-smirched plates from the afternoon tea table as Belinda arrived with the absolutely unblemished teapot. A perfect silver teapot: rotund, with a lid that fitted and a spout so placed that the pourer never spilt a drop.
At the sight of such perfection, Stella, shrill with champagne, said she’d have coffee and at the same time lamented, provocatively, the dwindling of the prototypical Motte to the impecunious, dented teapot present. One was given to suppose the Beauchamps thrived at the cost of Mottes, who were doddering off the planet in some confusion, having to be satisfied with rather less than the overcrowded family vaults in the better class of cemetery. Indeed, the name Motte was increasingly to be seen on those little plaques in brick walls in memorial gardens, after their rather plain coffins had descended to the furnace to the accompaniment of musak.
While Beauchamps watched, unmoved.
Beauchamps who had played the organ for generations, for whom it would be no great trouble to thrum out a threnody on an organ such as the one at Scunthorpe, donated – had Baby ever noticed? – by Augustus Motte, illustrious grandfather of she who took three sugars and several dollops of cream to sweeten a bitter cup.
As for us, who had been coughed up, diluted, by that viper Time, we fired cross volleys to the Mottean lamentations, intending to remind the lamenter of place and occasion. The new Christian took his godmother to the kitchen to have her instruct him in the art of chocolate snowball-making, for not only was his mother a heathen, she kept nothing worthy of a male child in her pantry.
In a neighbourhood short of greenery and parks, children will innovate. For his seventh birthday, my mother bought Eli a bright pink kite with a long tail, but Eli was at a loss to know where to fly it. Allegra condemned the kite as just the sort of frivolous present our mother would give, bourgeois old bitch. If it got caught in electric wires, Eli would be electrocuted. That was our mother’s trouble, she never took the local environment into account, and, as a consequence, always lived in an inappropriate way. Eli eyed his kite, chap-fallen, for some days. It was Kelly Kelly who knew the solution. Our anti-freeway protests had been made loudly enough to put the freeway project into abeyance for an indefinite time and, since the encroachment was wire-free and easily reached through the dump, it provided an ideal surface from which to learn to fly the kite.
Mad Meg Page 20