Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  It was still and warm outside. David, however, reeled from room to room as though he were out in high seas on a stormy night. At first people took it with good grace, but then David’s rival, Barrie Bull, came with his entourage from Not-Only-Hallett-But-Also-Coretti, and that meant two madmen in a confined space with an audience.

  As David lurched about, he began to chant: ‘Barrie Bull, Barrie Bull, Barrie Bull Bull Bull/Barrie Bull, Barrie Bull, Barrie Bull Bull Bull.’

  There were olives, cheese and taramasalata on trays in Mad Meg’s kitchen. Barrie Bull took a knife, albeit a bread and butter knife, out of the taramasalata and started challenging David to a duel.

  Allegra, unaware of what was going on inside, sat out in the mint patch, talking Proletarian to some students. Maggie and Kelly had gone and that left Rose and me to defend ourselves from behind the doors of Mad Meg’s office cupboard. Barrie Bull’s entourage gasped and sucked in air as their hero circled David menacingly.

  ‘You’re a cunt!’ snarled David, at his most delightful. Barrie Bull’s wife (who was a different person from his girlfriend) circled with the duellers (David’s weapon was a full wine glass), saying to David, ‘You never say that to Barrie! You never say that to Barrie!’, while David kept his free hand in his pocket and allowed his shoulder to be pummelled by the very much more nuggety Bull.

  ‘You better watch it!’ Barrie Bull was yelling. ‘You better watch it, cunt! Next time I see you, you’re dead meat!’

  Rose and I took some heart from that ‘next time’, but the circling went on. I wished I’d had a video recorder; what I meant in my work could not have been illustrated with greater clarity. It was art’s young homme célèbre, Barrie Bull, and his challenger acting out their animal ritual as if Mad Meg were a territorial breeding ground for crocs. But they were worse at it than crocodiles, there wasn’t that healthy thwack! of chainmailed breasts, that natural economy of thrashing which endangers only those within a body’s length of the combatants. Elizabeth Bull took an accidental blow to the jaw as Barrie raised his pummelling arm and retired, weeping, into the dumbfounded band of spectators.

  I was beginning to be sickened myself. These two bastards didn’t care what was on the walls – or perhaps they did, and either out of jealousy or contempt, were determined it wouldn’t stay there. Red wine was going everywhere as David, now armed with a newly opened bottle, fended off his assailant. When they staggered into the room where my ink washes were, I’d had enough. I fled out the back, from where Allegra was pushing her way in through the students, and sat huddled in the mint, praying to God, whether Blake’s or mine, that my work survived. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘please, God, so much work has gone into this. It can’t be that these bastards are going to wreck it all.’

  Thwack!

  Chop!

  Breaking glass, shrieking, and ‘Davey, Davey,’ said repeatedly, in a level, placating voice.

  The room with my ink washes in it, Allegra leaning into it, saying, ‘Davey, Davey, come on now, stop it.’ Barrie Bull has backed off, the bread and butter knife in the breast pocket of the waistcoat he has on over his tee shirt. The rooms are crowded now with people pressing in to lean on my paintings and take a look. Red wine all over my drawings. Checkie Laurington gasping over my shoulder. A rip in one of my acrylics where one of them pushed the other against the wall. Fat Pattie Gospel stares at it with her lip curled back. Jerry Gospel struts about insofar as the two-strut perimeter of the fight allows, ostentatiously waiting for Barrie Bull, who has now turned to me and is saying, ‘Isobel, you’re so sad. Why are you so sad?’

  A lot of work and thought went into my sketches. I tried to do a lot of things: to portray stasis and life, the ambivalent sexuality of men, the vulnerability of women, to convey brute strength in the skimming of an ink mark across paper and weight in the lick of a brush. David is still reeling and rolling and clumsily batting off Allegra, who is trying to calm him.

  I shall go home to my house where Nin and Eli are. Rose is saying, ‘Zis is terrible to destroy your work, Isobel. I sink zat young man is very difficult.’

  Difficult! I’ve been robbed, gutted, destroyed. Difficult! I should murder him! As I walk towards my house in a huddle of arms, I suppose to murder David I would have to murder history, kill the poor mad sister of Bart and Miles, and their father. I’d kill their father, if I could kill their father. I would eradicate him and those who made him the way he was.

  My hatred is intact. And it is not hatred of David but of the history that has culminated in brutality thrusting itself out of a velvet-skinned boy, of the historical usurper who has taken a naturally beautiful voice and twisted it around ugliness and spite.

  Crack! goes the sky, so loud my house shakes, then it is doused in light. Two hours ago it was still and warm. There is another rending crack, the light goes off and the sky, a giant’s sack of silver, rips dazzling apart.

  Eli pads from his bedroom and sticks his head into the sitting room. ‘Hear that?’ he croaks, sleepily.

  I ask, ‘You all right? Nin all right?’

  ‘She didn’t wake up,’ says Eli, ‘but her hair’s all drenched from sweat.’

  Crack! goes the sky again. ‘God, it’s like The Wizard of Oz,’ says Eli. The light flickers off and then on. ‘You all right, Mum? What’s the matter?’

  ‘They’ve wrecked my show,’ I sob.

  ‘What?’

  ‘David and Barrie Bull had a fight. They didn’t hurt each other, but they wrecked my show.’

  ‘Oh, Mum.’ Eli sits down and puts his arms around me. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know really. David got drunk and started taunting Barrie Bull. It was just a brawl.’

  ‘Did they wreck everything?’

  ‘My ink washes, one of my acrylics. I didn’t stay to count the rest.’

  Rose comes out of the kitchen, with tea and a brandy for each of us. She sits on the floor, shaking her head.

  ‘Jesus!’ says Eli, leaping up, suddenly angry. He punches himself in the hand. ‘Is he still at Mad Meg?’

  ‘I don’t know, darling. Don’t make it worse.’

  ‘I’ll kill him.’

  ‘So would your muzzer, given ’alf a chance,’ says Rose.

  ‘Let it be, boy. I’m too upset for more drama tonight.’

  And we are saved from more drama by the phone. Eli answers. ‘It’s Gran, Mum, she wants to talk to you.’

  ‘Jesus, it’s midnight!’

  ‘She just wants proof you’re home.’

  I clap the receiver into my ear. ‘Hello,’ I say, unencouragingly.

  ‘Just checking.’

  ‘God, Mum …’

  ‘Well, darling, you never know. I just didn’t like to think Eli might have been there on his own.’

  ‘Good grief, Mum, he’s sixteen! He can look after himself.’

  ‘Well, darling, I can’t help it. I am his grandmother, after all. He could’ve been hit by lightning or something.’

  ‘What a grotesque imagination you have!’

  ‘I can’t help it. The light’s been off here. I s’pose it’s been off there, too, has it?’

  ‘Well, of course it has! We’re on the same circuit, you silly old faggot!’

  ‘There’s something making noises in my back garden.’

  ‘Probably the plants.’

  ‘Oh, you are hard. I think it’s a stunned rat or something; it’s kind of crying. My dogs might get it.’

  ‘Well, if it’s a rat you’d be better off if the dogs did get it. Sool them onto it and make sure.’

  ‘It might be a cat. And even if it was a rat, rats can’t help it. They didn’t ask to be born rats. Anyway, they’re quite intelligent; they can be quite tame.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you take some cheese out to the back door and whistle it up? I’m sorry, but I’m not about to court divine electrocution for the sake of a stricken rat!’ I have to yell as the thunder is exploding and rolling all around us now.

  �
�It’s a funny thing it isn’t raining yet,’ my mother yells back, terrified.

  ‘Well, don’t go poking your head out into it, it might be struck off!’

  ‘Oooh, oooh, think of all those poor young unemployed people out in it!’

  ‘Oh, Mum, go back to bed! Go on, get yourself a brandy and go back to bed.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be a rat …’

  ‘You just said yourself that rats are quite intelligent. The best of vermin are happily sitting in their holes right now, waiting for the cataclysm to pass. I’m sure they won’t hold it against you if you do the same.’

  ‘Oh, you are hard-hearted. There are lots of kids out in it, or don’t you read the papers? They’re being kicked out of their homes all over the place.’

  ‘Well, I’m not kicking Eli out, and I’ve got Nin here, too. So you can rest in peace.’

  ‘Why’ve you got Nin there?’

  ‘Eli was minding her. We had an opening at Mad Meg.’

  ‘Oh, did it go well?’

  ‘Not very.’

  ‘Whose was it?’

  ‘Mine.’

  ‘Oh. Nobody tells me anything.’

  ‘Sorry. I’m just cross about something that happened. Two blokes got drunk and some of the work was damaged.’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry, darling.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t have liked the work, anyway. You’d probably have cheered.’

  ‘Oh, don’t say that.’

  ‘Well, it’s true. Now, just go to bed, all right? Just go to bed and go to sleep and forget about rats and cats and plants and other people’s problems, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ and the phone goes down and you can tell by the resigned clicking it makes that exhortations to common sense will have no effect.

  ‘God, you’re cruel to Grandma,’ breathes Eli. He puts his hands on my shoulders and peers clownishly into my face. ‘Couldn’t you be a bit nicer? I mean she is old.’

  ‘She’s always been like that.’

  ‘Well …’ he puts his head on one side, ‘if there was a cat out our back, wouldn’t you …?’

  ‘No!’

  He laughs through his nose. ‘Liar,’ he says and points to the black cat Yorta who is knocking on the window to get in.

  ‘That was different. I couldn’t stand the look on her face. And anyway, Yafta needed a companion.’ Yafta is our tabby, won four years ago by Eli in a Nature Study test; the teacher’s cat had had kittens.

  Suddenly it’s raining and a terrific wind has begun to blow. We rush for the open windows and batten everything. Just as we are battening, there is a deafening crash. We turn in from our windows and gape at each other, tingling with fear. ‘It must be the blue gum at the front of the house, the plumbers who fixed my pipes warned me it had shallow roots.’

  And it is the gum, the electric wires swinging like a skipping rope above it, the current pulsing in concert through the lights inside the house.

  ‘Did I hear someone calling?’ cries Rose, above the din. Eli thinks he’s heard it, too.

  ‘Bel! Bel!’ It’s Allegra in the street in a maelstrom of hair. She can’t get across the yard. We can just see her, pointing at the tree and shouting, ‘David’s under it!’

  The lights are out now and Eli has our biggest torch. We follow him out into the roaring, raining garden. And indeed, David is lying on the lawn under some of the branches, but he doesn’t seem hurt, he’s reciting. ‘Natheless I had been a tree within the wood,’ he chants, hooting and laughing against the rain. ‘And many a new thing understood/ That was rank folly to my head before.’ Then he lies there, chuckling.

  ‘Can you stand up?’ asks Eli.

  ‘I am standing up,’ answers David. Inside the house, poor Nin pits her lungs against the storm.

  Eli treated David with a mixture of high regard and scorn. David knew every sporting statistic there had ever been and this went down extremely well with Eli, who also watched David’s dedication to his work with admiration.

  But as Eli grew so did the ambiguity in his feelings. He needed men in his life and David was one of them. He would talk football and life with David in a way he could never talk to Allegra or me. This kind of conversation was not available for him with Reg, as Reg was more interested in hearing what he himself had to say, and as for Miles, he existed on a different plane.

  Eli’s need for men’s company was not an absolute need for the dominance hierarchy. For all the rubbishings we’d taken over my failure to thwart his warlike and chauvinistic instincts, it was clear that inside his imaginings was a basic need to care, to lead and to protect. This was how he used his increasing size; his feats of manhood were written into him. It was clear that Eli was going to be a paternalist; he was bound to aggravate many women and bound to be told one day that the need to care, lead and protect is also part of a woman’s psyche. Eli’s character was quite forceful, verging sometimes on overbearing, but never violent. He was kind, and his kindness extended to David.

  In turn, David had two types of feeling towards Eli. On the one hand he considered him lazy and not particularly intelligent; on the other, he admired Eli’s marked ability at sport.

  Be it said that, like David, Eli couldn’t change a light bulb either. It was not that he did not know how to, but that something would inevitably interrupt him mid-change and he’d forget all about it. Strips were mown off the lawns around our new house, but there was always something better to do than mow.

  We left David out in the rain that night, having helped Allegra in over the fallen tree with great difficulty in the darkness, the wind and the wet. She gashed her leg and while Rose was seeing to it I put a sleeping bag on the verandah for David, weighed down with a brick so it wouldn’t blow away. But about an hour afterwards he was bashing on the doors and windows belligerently. Eli went and stood challengingly in the front doorway and David quietened down. When told he’d better not come inside, however, he manipulated Eli into going outside and then back to the Edwardian house with him.

  There, after more great difficulty clambering over the fallen tree, he kept Eli up all night, showing him first of all his old school reports – ‘He was drunk, Mum,’ was Eli’s explanation of that – and then, to demonstrate his industriousness, his latest work. When Eli came home at last, there was a war in him: care and respect for me on one side, admiration of David, mad and all as he was, on the other. ‘You have to hand it to him,’ Eli said, ‘he works.’

  ‘So do I,’ I answered.

  ‘Yes,’ said Eli, ‘and your work attracts more attention than his, even though you work full time as well. He’ll suffer for this in more ways than you might think.’

  ‘Why are you defending him? He ruined months of my work. That show was a departure for me, a new start. Don’t defend him, Eli, he doesn’t deserve defence. He’s going to try to sweet-talk his way back into Allegra’s life and never make amends for what he’s done. He can’t make amends. It’s disgraceful, he’s disgraceful, there’s no honour in him at all.’

  ‘I’m not defending him. What he did was despicable, but he will suffer.’

  We left my show on the walls of Mad Meg so people could see the destruction for themselves. It was abhorred by the critics in the papers. A couple of reviewers who’d seen it before the fight were full of praise for it. For once, no one said I was Dadda’s daughter.

  As for David, reviews of his work, which heretofore had usually been excellent, ceased to appear. He sold nothing, had made enemies and no one wanted to handle him, even Miles for the time being. But if he suffered, Barrie Bull, being worth too much, did not. Though it was well known that he had provoked the fight, people still rolled up at Not-Only-But-Also to buy him, even people who’d personally expressed their outrage to me: sincerity has the depth of a ten-dollar bill held sideways in Melbourne.

  It was a storm-stricken crow my mother had found floundering around her back verandah. Must’ve had an injured wing, she thought. It looked at her, she looked at it. It went caw! she w
ent caw! She went inside, took a towel from the bathroom, terrified of it drowning in so much rain. She eyed it, it eyed her; it went caw! again, she went caw! Only a crow, she thought, didn’t ask to be born a crow, though remembered crows on Clare picking the eyes out of newborn lambs, but a city crow, she thought, it wouldn’t have. Her brothers would have shot it, that made her … She wasn’t afraid anymore, just determined. Only pecked her once … see, and laughingly showed me the hole in her finger. Put it in a box and covered it in net till morning. Then rang. When they said, ‘Where are you?’ gave the address, but they asked for her membership number.

  Member? Didn’t know you had to be a member. Car number plate, then? Don’t own a car. But, madam, this is the RACV, more laughing, wanted the RSPCA.

  A girl came by eventually and took it away; such a nice girl, spoke well, thought she couldn’t wear green, however, and had equine teeth … s’pose that’s what comes. Rang up later, couldn’t stop thinking about it, ‘Hey, remember me? I’m the old bat who rescued the crow.’ Rescued the crow to catch the bat, swallowed the bat to catch the rat; remember, poor old lady thought she’d die? They said, ‘Sorry to tell you this, madam, but we had to put it down.’ Poor old lady cried.

  Rudge and Plant had given her a handshake when she turned sixty-five, but it wasn’t a golden one, ‘Not even brass,’ she said. It was a marcasite watch, chosen by Marjorie Rudge of the fake fur coat. Stella had been awarded our family house in the divorce settlement, so she had a small amount of security. Charming as ever with bank managers, she worked to a system of mortgage raising and repayment which leant more to the raising side of things than the repaying.

  During the Allegra–Stella war (which was beginning to make the thirty-years war look short, and was being fought in fits and starts around the exigencies of babysitting) there were unavoidable coincidences. For instance, queuing for a teller, one behind the other, in the bank where both of them had accounts resulted in Allegra closing hers for no reason that was apparent to the teller.