Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  Eli loved his kite and took it with him whenever he could. It was something of a nuisance on trams, but Eli insisted that we take it to show his grandfather. He wouldn’t dismantle it because, he said, people on the tram might like to look at it.

  We used to meet Dadda in a South Yarra cafe. On the day of the kite, we ambled down Toorak Road to Fawkner Park to fly it.

  After all his practice with Kelly Kelly on the encroachment, Eli’s kite-flying was showy. The kite looped and swooped, trembled and flapped rapidly and audibly at the edges. When Dadda tried, however, it described a course like a heartbeat on a cardiogram and, rather than embarrass himself by learning in public from a seven-year-old, he gave it back to Eli, around whom there was soon a small crowd watching the pink tail furling in the clear blue sky.

  Eli laughed and cheered and danced with the kite strings. ‘Look at this! Look at this!’ he cried and put the kite to zigzagging tricks. ‘Isn’t it bourgeois, Granpa! It’s so bourgeois!’

  Dadda started laughing. ‘Oh my, ye-es. Ye-es, Eli, it is bourgeois, now you mention it. It’s as bourgeois as anything.’

  ‘Gran’s bourgeois, she’s bour-geois!’ And he drew a big S for Stella in the sky.

  ‘Really?’ Dadda responded, stroking his chin.

  ‘She’s my bourgeois Grandma! She gave me my kite.’

  It was hard to say which of his grandparents Eli loved more. He loved my mother for her kindheartedness and would wax furious if Allegra and I put her down. He told us we were horrible to her and we ought to give her a few hugs from time to time. But for me, working out when I ought to give the first hug kept me from giving it, and all my troubles seemed due to her. Both Allegra and I kept telling Eli he’d find out in time why we were antagonistic towards her.

  We were on a football field. It was autumn, white moths among glossy greenery, swallows cruising, Dadda directly under the kite with his head turned up. I became aware of someone standing beside me. Unusually for an autumn day in a Melbourne park, she was carrying a white lace parasol. Under it, I discerned the doll pink cheeks and doll bright eyes of Rose Hirsch, Siècle’s one-time right-hand woman.

  ‘Zees is your little boy, Isobel?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘’Is grandpère says ’is name is Eli, no? ’E is very clever wis the cerf volant. ’Ow do you say it in English?’

  ‘Kite,’ I said, thinking the accent a little far-fetched after thirty years residence down among the drab vowels and the antipodean fondness for elision. I was to discover, nonetheless, that Rose Hirsch never lost her very French accent; it was as much a part of her as the beauty spot on her chin.

  ‘Is zis some kind of animal, zis kite?’

  ‘I’m not sure, I don’t know. I think there’s some sort of bird called a kite.’

  ‘Oh, really? In French it is like a … somesing wis antler?’

  ‘A reindeer, maybe?’

  ‘Yes, zat is right.’ She called to my father, ‘Ey! Henri!’ Entranced by the kite, he waved without looking at her. Rose and he were obviously in frequent contact.

  ‘’E is a champion,’ said Rose of Eli. ‘Tell me, ’ow is sings wis you and your beautiful sister at zis Mad Meg gallery?’

  ‘Fine, Rose.’

  ‘I came to your last show zere, your own paintings. It is very good work. Very nice gallery.’ She smiled at me. ‘No, seriously, Isobel. You are a very talented painter. But I sink it is hard for you to find enough time to do your work, no?’

  I was surprised Rose knew anything about me. Everyone in Melbourne knew about Rose, who was famous for her eccentricities. I hadn’t thought that someone as devoted to being extraordinary could possibly be interested in anyone else.

  ‘I love your little boy. ’E ’as such a beautiful chin,’ she ran the back of her hand up under her own chin. ‘So pretty. Delicate. I love it where ze veins go. Tell me, ’ow do you like ze job you ’ave in zat garden?’

  ‘How did you know about that?’

  ‘A little vulture told me.’

  ‘Oh? The second Mrs Henry Coretti?’

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘How does she know? I didn’t want Dadda to be told.’

  ‘Ze second Mrs Henri Coretti knows everysing, my de-ah. She ’as a spy ring operating. Your fuzzer would ’elp you if you asked. Why don’t you ask ’im?’

  ‘I don’t want to, I’d rather do it myself.’

  ‘Well, I don’t mean to interfere, Isobel, but you must plan for ze future. Your fuzzer is quite a rich man zese days. You ought to know ’ow rich. You ought to sink about zese sings if only for ze sake of your muzzer. After all, your muzzer was Henri’s wife zrough ze years of ’is poverty. Do you ’ave any of ’is paintings?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘None at all? But zis is terrible!’

  ‘It would be too difficult for my mother. She finds it painful to look at them. And if Allegra and I had one in our house, it would make us feel bad on our mother’s account.’

  ‘But I sink zat your muzzer and your sister are at war, no?’

  ‘What, the vulture told you that, too, did she?’

  ‘No. Your fuzzer told me zis.’

  ‘Well, they are fighting. But that doesn’t mean they hate each other. They just believe in different things. Our mother is old fashioned.’

  ‘But what about you, Isobel? Why should you not ’ave some of your fuzzer’s paintings?’

  ‘I told you. It would make my mother and Allegra feel bad.’

  ‘Zat is not sufficient reason. Henri is a famous and beautiful painter, and ’e is famous because ’is work merits it. You are ’is daughter, ’e was never able to give you much before, but now … You ’ave earned it. It is what ’e owes to your muzzer and your sister. ’E feels it; ’e says so. We must see each ozzer sometimes, Isobel. I know many sings about your fuzzer. Your parents’ marriage didn’t last, but zere are many reasons to be proud of Henri Coretti.’

  ‘We hate his wife.’

  ‘’Ate. I don’t like zis word ’ate. People should not cut zere arms off for a broken finger.’

  ‘What about people with broken hearts?’

  ‘Ah, now zat is different.’

  ‘Well, what’s the cure, Rose?’

  ‘Alas, zere is no cure for a broken ’eart. Come to see me, Isobel. We ’ave much to talk about.’

  Eli’s pink kite hovered in a sky of gold standard blue. Eli was its eyes, searching out its prey.

  ‘A plus tard, Henri!’ called Rose to my father, and her face, when she turned to say goodbye to me, broke into a complicit smile.

  I was waking every day with a pain in my back. It was as if I had spent all night standing. It was the pain of picking up heavy loads, as when Eli and Chantal were babies and I carried one on each hip.

  The pain went when I was working at my easel, but it came back at my potting job. Eight hours a day I worked, four days a week, sitting in the greenhouse, potting and labelling. I didn’t have to be so industrious, but I was preoccupied and didn’t want to have to talk. I tried to imagine all the orchids in the world, so I could pot and label the lot simultaneously. For this I would be given a lump sum and told I could retire. Then I could leave my job, buy our house from the owner, pick up Eli from school and live.

  When I thought about Dadda and The Brolga, my heart hardened. If he was rich, as no doubt he was, then his money was contaminated.

  The pain in my back grew severe when I thought of my mother. I loved her and hated her; she was wonderful and terrible. I remembered how proud of her I had felt when I was a child. She had been the pretty person with the swinging step, the mother to end all mothers. She had loved and laughed and done her best for all of us. But her load had become impossible and she herself had done nothing to stop it becoming so. I couldn’t bear to think of it; I tried not to think of it. Whenever I started to think of it, I allowed myself to be carried off by Arnie. Saved. Loved. Cared about.

  I moved away from the other potters and sat behind a mount
ain of black pots. I potted, I labelled, I wept. Abdul bin Hadji, the short and shiny ganger, perved on me. He thought he could draw. He wanted to draw me. He asked me to come to his bungalow home so he could. He wanted to see me without my clothes.

  I moved back to the other potters. Ferdie, the tall and very thin Egyptian, fended off the short and shiny ganger but asked for my hand in marriage in return. I said, ‘Fancy wanting to marry my hand!’ and I showed him one of them with its filthy, broken nails. Ferdie was amiable enough. He was a part-time uni student. He had come to Australia to do an engineering degree.

  Then bin Hadji told me that Ferdie was camp, and ordered me to distant parts of the garden, following me. ‘You have a child,’ he kept saying. ‘You should get married. I will marry you.’

  Before I could ask Beryl Blake for a change of job, I learnt that bin Hadji was a project of hers. She had saved him from deportation three times. ‘If he could find an Australian wife,’ she said, ‘he could stay.’ I thought of this woman who had nothing in her life but Botany, good deeds and a hopeless passion for the man she called ‘The Bish’, and though I had grievances, I held my hush.

  When ‘The Bish’ was coming, the herbarium and its neighbouring rooms were cleaned. Important notices appeared on the bulletin board, such as ‘Nun Cures Migraine’, ‘Catholics in Niu Gini’ and ‘India, Land of Miracles’. We were paraded and the sins of the world against us were given audience. ‘The Bish’ in his Catholic caftan jerked slowly past us, crushing his right fist into the mortar of his left hand. Grinding sin. He hissed, ‘Yess, yess,’ to Beryl Blake’s recital of woe. There was a fervid glint in the whites of his eyes and spittle on his lower lip. His hair fell in licorice straps over his forehead. Perhaps he knew of a Jesuit solution to the world and would reveal it in the fullness of time.

  Visits from ‘The Bish’ were pretty nearly always followed by a bout of falling off chairs under the compassionate gaze of Loyola O’Flynn.

  This garden, then, was a catafalque for a woman’s ruined mind. I could see her pain. I drew her, feeling the pull of her indecorous rubber thongs between her toes, the foot sweat in summer weather, the shanks she’d probably never even looked at. Long, straight grey hairs grew beneath her knees. Her gut was the size of a full-term pregnancy. No neck, just a head stuck on like a dob of plasticine. I felt for her what I’d felt for Uncle Garth. Because of her I painted a crowd of bottom-heavy people with tiny, ineffectual wings. Their faces were turned upwards, unable to reach the dazzling lightning in the sky.

  All Allegra could say in reaction to the picture was, ‘I’m not sure about this. It’s a bit metaphysical. Do you think you ought to change your job?’

  I was almost Allegra’s opposite; in love with my painting but timid of my fate. Thin and boylike, I crept about as a cat does, looking for a place to soothe myself. I was lovesick. Happy moments passed like lightning; pain, like gravity, tied me to my course.

  Maggie Kelly was the only person to whom I could unburden myself. We shared our photos: two of Johnny Green and one of Arnie, climbing the Acropolis. It was almost as if we were sharing an illicit secret, yet these were the fathers of our children, an out-of-focus hood on a motorbike and a striding colossus beside whose head a guard further up the mountain hovered like a toy.

  I hadn’t known Johnny Green and Maggie hadn’t known Arnie, but we looked for their features in our children and were happy when we found them. This child-scanning we indulged in brought us close.

  Maggie had no doubt at all that the art critical troika of the Mad Meg collective were sham leftists; ‘Nouveau Proletariat’ was her name for them. They had brought with them a linguistic code that ordinary people never use, except in jest or mimicry. Their game was to adopt key words like ‘issue’ and then to construct a hierarchy of ‘issues’ to make those problems that didn’t affect them look unimportant and therefore not worth bothering about.

  But Maggie held her ground. The bourgeois stratagems involved in making the freeway did not escape her. First she drew our attention to the type of person whom the freeway would displace. On the most probable route, there were no middle-class constructions under threat of demolition. The houses at the freeway outlet, for which the Nouveau Proletariat were not alone in wanting protection from lead and noise pollution, had become middle-class dwellings, having belonged, at the time when the plans were drawn up, to the working class. All along the plan had been to move the poor and, to satisfy the consciences of those who were going to move them, they would be shunted into high-rise flats or pushed to the city fringes where they would become isolated. In this situation of shabby newness and bad service, the voice of the poor would effectively be stifled, while the problems of poverty would be magnified in outer suburban ghettos.

  It was easy to see that what Maggie said was right, and when you looked into it in any depth you could see the importance of solidarity among poor people. This led me to take comrades Marx, Engels and Lenin from the library, to learn how solidarity could be brought to the poor of Melbourne.

  Ours was an area in which migrants established themselves through the fruit shops, the takeaways, the electrical shops, the butchers and the corner stores. It was cosmopolitan and kept on renewing itself. Melbourne’s extensive Italian, Greek and Jewish communities had all had a foothold here at some time. Most had started out as petty bourgeois. To my dismay, Comrade Marx called petty bourgeois socialism both reactionary and utopian, and on these grounds to be deplored. Worse still, Comrade Lenin didn’t see why the petty bourgeoisie shouldn’t be killed outright by the wage slaves, among whom he counted doctors and lawyers. Rumpton, Rudge, Russell and Plant would be saved in the red revolution, probably against their wills, while the proprietors of the Pantechnicon and Mad Meg, who would both manufacture and carry the leftist banners, could expect the guillotine. Maybe the Manifesto and The State and Revolution had suffered in translation to the extent that everywhere you looked in them, the hatred of shops and shopping was writ large.

  For all my misgivings, the ALP came to power at the end of 1972 and there was much rejoicing in the Mad Meg quarter. Within three months of the swearing in of ‘twenty-seven more state funerals’, as one minister called the ALP cabinet, the Attorney-General had raided his own department and set the pace. One Catholic member in the House said he didn’t mind if homosexuality was legalised so long as it wasn’t made compulsory. Bill after bill after bill would go from the House of Representatives to the Senate and come back again, unpassed, because the ALP didn’t have a Senate majority. They were heady times, and might have been headier had Victoria not had a Liberal state government. The fight against the freeway was far from over.

  I had been foolish enough to raise my interpretation of Marx, Engels and Lenin at a collective meeting. Yes, there was no getting away from it, my political scientist of a sister averred, now the Left was in power, we would have to examine the morality of the ownership of Mad Meg being concentrated in so few hands.

  The moral examination was done on the spot and it was decided, four votes to three, that Mad Meg should not only be run as a collective, but owned as one as well. The dissenters were Maggie, the Catholic art historian (whose name was Cathy) and me. The official reason given for dissent was that whereas the Nouveau Proletarian troika had access to capital, Maggie and Cathy hadn’t. Maggie and Kelly paid rent for the Pantechnicon. The people who owned the building were active and valuable anti-freeway campaigners because they owned a cluster of shops which would all go if one of the freeway proposals came into effect. On the other hand, they were enemies of Maggie and Kelly, who were doing modestly well out of their shop and didn’t want it to be demolished so the owners could build a projected shopping mall. The Pantechnicon had not yet come under direct threat because the owners were locked in a battle with the Historic Buildings Trust. The Trust wanted to preserve a beautiful Victorian awning, behind which the Pantechnicon and its neighbours lay low, staving off hikes in the rent and being asked to feel privileged by th
eir continued, leaseless occupancy.

  Cathy had bought herself a house and had nothing extra to spare, although she wanted to help run the gallery, however it was owned. Allegra would have broken down the ownership to a fifth each, but I said no; if she wanted co-operative ownership, then I wanted Maggie in and was prepared to buy a sixth on her behalf.

  ‘But that’ll leave you with a third of the vote,’ the Troika decided.

  ‘I’ll forfeit a sixth to Maggie.’ At the back of my mind, as I voiced this thought, was a feeling, firstly, that that’s what they meant, since Maggie and I were often in agreement, and, secondly, a dread for the day when we would sell Mad Meg on what looked like remaining an open property market, despite Allegra’s prophecy that property would be abolished. I could see the bickering now, and if I’d had a more forceful character, might have bought out of the gallery there and then, but it was Allegra’s dream. She wanted a new egalitarian world: not an armchair paradise but a real place towards which she was certain she had started out.

  Allegra had an optimist’s attitude to money. Every dollar spent was a dollar earned, but she seemed to think that if she did the spending, she also did the earning. This strange trait caused her cheques to bounce and meant she had fairly frequent and voluble meetings with bank managers. She had inherited the rationale for this behaviour from our mother, but she lacked our mother’s invention in dealing with it.