Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  You tumble into daylight and do things, then tumble out of it into a sleep you think was dreamless in the recalling of it. Why dream? If you want to dream, you might as well stay awake. Those times you wake up at two o’clock, three o’clock, in pitch dark, can probably be accounted for by worry – you’ve a lot on your plate – or a full bladder, too much instant coffee, not enough physical exertion. Cut the coffee. Jog. Go to yoga classes, and say your mantra over and over till none of it matters.

  Allegra, when I talk to you, doors bang, taps run, and radios talk back to me. A rat scratches in the ceiling, there are ticks, clicks, squeaks; the floorboards shift and the dust falls under them.

  I try to draw you, but your image baulks at my hand.

  I try to write you. The words come down on the page. Word, word, word, word: nose, eyes, lips, hair. I scrape, I rake, I assemble lines in the dark, and they feel nothing like you. They are small, pointy, rutted, but your hair was crisp, electric.

  I chop. I grope. I live in the forest now, where my axe rings cries from the trees. The chips fly out from the divots: wretched, broken, dangerous little things that, stuck together, cannot make a tree.

  A hot wind bashes the house and sets the flyscreens thudding. Hydrangeas sock their moppet heads against the fence slats. The ground cracks, the lobelias rust like wire. The summer dances wildly with itself. Is it you? Oh, if it’s you, Allegra, come into my room.

  Autumn, and the torn tired gardens reel giddily. The leaves come down without changing colour. They are crisp underfoot, then soaking.

  Then the winter falls in with an immense, laboured groaning, bending the branches back like fingers in an iron tango, snapping against the torsion of the trunks. Great crows, like incinerated pages, ride the currents, and clatter on the roof.

  There is a false spring. Buds appear along the branches, growing where they can, but the sun, treacherous, early, abandons them to storms. Then there is lightning, then rain.

  Listen, Allegra. The rattling of the last tram has stopped. The distant boom of an all-night tanker passes. In a far room the soft head of a dog bumps under a chair. Green digits in the dark go 3.00, 3.00, 3.00. You can hear the night pressing onwards with a high-pitched sound that varies in amplitude like the wheels of millions of minute wagons turning.

  Listen. The sound you hear is the sound of mortal time. You hear it on the skin and under it; you hear it on the fringe of sense. Rhythmic, fearful, it is measuring life in years lived, things owned, children had, marriages, mortgages and love run out of. Sometimes it seems contained like a dead weight in a flour sack, and other times it is as insubstantial as a bead of light rising in the sky. It is the booming of air in arid valleys where progress is the passage of light through moving clouds and your voice is a light thing, dispersing. It is that music, that mud music. It is the birth of moments, hours, days and years to come.

  The fender of night is about to bump softly on its mooring. It is a vast, scudding shipful of sound, and what if … it does not bump? Are we poured into it, dreamless, forever?

  I try to shape the dark into your image, dancing slow, sad and quiet. But you are black air moving on useless hands.

  I couldn’t bear our mother’s pity. It was real, sweet, and when she offered it, I wept. But I couldn’t bear it. For the time being, I was set against my mother and longed to drive my fingers through the leaf litter under the trees at Harry Laurington’s beach house to feel my father on my skin.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Relations

  MY MOTHER IS waiting to be driven somewhere. In the room of the house that is now hers, all hers except for the mortgage she has raised on it, and has been all hers now for years, except for the mortgages she has raised on it year after year as if she were a small, stout dog chasing its docked tail slowly. I can see her through the thief-proof flywire door. The lock has been changed three times in the past twelve months, for fear that people who have been in the house when the keys were mislaid have in fact taken the keys and may come back with them for her furniture and colour television set and electric foot-warmer (a present from one of her boarders), leaving her bereft of her comforts

  There aren’t any boarders now, just dogs and furniture and photographs.

  She is waiting to be driven to the cemetery. It is now over a year since Allegra died. We are going to visit Allegra. I can see her through the slats of her new trendy fence, which was put up on part of the mortgage money, and the flywire, thief-proof door with its three-times-altered lock, all of which, locks and door, were also purchased on the mortgage money, and she is bending over a table at the end of the hall. Her back is turned to me and she does not know yet that I am here, because her dogs have gone deaf and are probably, in any event, still in bed, and the noise of my car pulling up has not entered the slow traffic of their neurones. Perhaps I should drive round the block and pull up again, making more noise this time, so that their familiar racket will not shock her into thinking I am a terrorist.

  She was not always stout, but she was never still, and is not still now. She is grabbing things, and I can tell by the shudder of her moth-holed cashmere jumper across her back that she is whistling. She has spent a lifetime not quite knowing how to whistle: part of her seems to say that a person who whistles is jolly, another part says that whistling is unladylike.

  She does not look up as I click the gate. Sometimes she slinks through her house as if she were an intruder, apologising to photographs of people bearing features similar to, but sterner than, her own. These two-dimensional Mottes watch her from walls and tables as if they had the power to condemn. Nina casts the sternest glance of all. She seems to be saying that no Motte worth her salt would ever have gone off to be married to an enemy alien under the bushes in a public park, in a frock not even run up by a dressmaker.

  Irregular pieces of chipped granite border her eccentric garden, in which she seeks to induce the life in every twig. The boozers and derelicts of the plant world sprawl and falter wherever there is ground to be remotely upright in. I take a piece of the granite that won’t be missed and place it in the pocket of my jacket, so it knocks against my thigh as I climb the steps to the verandah where Allegra and I once married each other in front of a chest-of-drawers altar.

  I ring the bell and drum collection, and immediately the dogs jerk into chorus. My mother gives a brief shriek and leaps into action, grabbing a coat, a bag, a brolly and two bunches of flowers from a vase as she comes down the hall. Clock, clock, clock.

  ‘Just a minute,’ she says as she fiddles for quite some time with the wrong keys in the latch, her features dulled under the sheen of the wire door.

  ‘Your dogs need tuning,’ I say.

  She is through the door, dangling a live mouse in her arthritic fingers. ‘What’d you say? Take this mouse, will you?’ I take the mouse. She shuts the doors. The inner door, the outer door. ‘Just put it over next door’s fence, there’s a love.’ I chuck the mouse over the fence, and she places a bunch of freesias between her teeth as she negotiates the gate, stepping through like a ballroom dance student. On the street she starts to laugh. ‘Sorry. Poor thing. I found it in the kitchen. I do hope it will be all right in there.’ And she puts her nose over her neighbour’s fence. ‘Can’t see it … ooh, there it is. It’s all right.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘It’s probably frightened. It’s walking sideways. I hope you didn’t throw it hard. Oh, there we are, it’s straightening up. It should be okay. I fed it a biscuit.’

  I am in the car and opening the door for her. ‘Hurry up.’

  As she clambers in, gathering up her wayward dimensions to fit in the seat, she’s already apologising for putting me through what we haven’t gone through yet. She kisses my cheek. ‘Now I promise, cross my heart …’ a feat performed with difficulty, considering her irregular burden and her ample left breast, ‘… I’ll behave myself.’ She starts to whistle and claps on her cemetery-visiting face as I start the car.

  She tell
s me about some money-saving cake she baked this morning. ‘You only use one egg,’ she says. ‘You’ll have to tell me what you think. I’ve got a surprise this afternoon. Someone’s coming. But she’s exactly the sort of person who’ll be able to tell how many eggs there are in a cake. We’re related. You bake it for thirty-five minutes exactly. By my stove, anyway. I’m going to write a book called “Stoves I Have Known”, because gas stoves burn your bottoms. I haven’t got any cream to put on it. I couldn’t afford cream. I don’t suppose you’ve got any?’

  ‘I have. You can have it.’

  ‘Will it be enough?’

  ‘Three bottles.’

  ‘What sort?’

  ‘Cream.’

  ‘Thickened?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t like thickened cream. It’s a con. Allegra used to say it was poisoned. Remember that cake I sent over? She said the cream was off, but it wasn’t, it was thickened. Did you buy that rose tree you were going to buy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Standard Red?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Nina’ll be pleased.’

  ‘We’re not planting it over Aunt Nina.’

  ‘Remember when we did? Allegra wouldn’t come, had something else on, someone’s opening. It was after she came back from Adelaide that time. “God!” she roared, “Tony Furlonger’s selling our furniture! And he’s let Nina’s grave go to pot!” We decided to plant the rose tree then. I don’t suppose anyone’s been to see it since?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘It’s probably dead. Remember how hot it was? Roses need a lot of watering when you put them in. And you, poor thing, you had to drive all that way.’

  ‘I didn’t have to. I chose to. I thought it would be nice to plant a rose tree on the grave.’ And I think of the word ‘nice’, and Aunt Nina liking it and us planting the tree because we wanted to make a gesture to her, even if she wasn’t there, not to assuage our guilt but because we’d loved her and we missed her.

  Just as I’m tripping over Dadda and our incapacity to make a gesture there, my mother pats my wrist hesitantly and says, ‘It’s a shame we can’t visit Dadda. It’s funny, but I brought these freesias because he always liked freesias, your poor old father.’

  ‘Yes. All right.’

  ‘He wasn’t such a bad man. There’ve been worse. He did his best.’

  I can’t help myself from saying, ‘I’m sure it’s quite respectable to bring freesias in memory of Dadda. And as for his best, it was a hell of a lot better than most other people’s best.’

  ‘Yes, Bel.’ She’s quiet for a while and I feel castigated by my own irritation. ‘Well, she’ll be glad you brought that rose. Allegra always loved standard roses. Did you ever find out …?’

  ‘No.’ She is asking whether we ever discovered where Dadda’s ashes were. Somehow or other, Allegra and I decided we wouldn’t tell her. We felt something shameful in it and decided it was better to be hostile than forthcoming. Our mother would almost certainly have wanted to go to Harry’s beach house and pat the ground.

  ‘Well, I’m just asking,’ she says, and why shouldn’t she want to know where Dadda’s buried? After all, she was his wife for all those years. She’d sooner pat the earth he lay in than own something he left behind, but it rankles that she doesn’t understand his stature as an artist. He was a failure to her, he ‘did his best’, as if art were an occupation for mental defectives.

  I think sometimes there’s no point in talking to anybody; it’s a myth that people listen to what you say. They hear you, the pattern of noises is familiar; it falls on them like a blanket, new and exciting at first, but by degrees faded, thinner, till they start to think it’s ready for the charity bag. What does she think of me? She thinks I am a failure, an unknown painter, at least I don’t paint flowers. An Old Maid.

  There are pencil pines bordering the cemetery, like distorted pompadours, bewitchingly green in the morning light, stuffed with yapping mynahs. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha! Great are the passions of human kind! Ha ha! To be a bird … to have a brain the size of a walnut and to live automatic, but flyingly. To take fright and easily burst from the green, get it over with quickly, with an easy, slithering bird crap, heedless of fouling the fence wire, dart back and settle in again, all predestined. Instead of being ungainly, fleshy, adulterous and long lived. Well, inclined towards adultery, or men half my age: there’s not an awful lot of choice when you’re nudging forty. Allegra will never have to reach it.

  I take the spade and the little rose tree from the hatch of my car and cross the verge as my mother swings the turnstile in the cemetery fence. A dog squeezes by us, its feet drumming up the broken path, scattering the little skinks into the crevices of old graves. Body bobbing, ears back, it leaps among the weeds and monuments, startling a squad of black birds into flying up briefly in formation, flapping once like a pennant, and settling out on telegraph wires above the castellated tower of the caretaker’s house. Cabbage moths flit, taking up the wan light on the whiteness of their wings. Clock, clock, clock. My mother is following me, more like child than mother.

  Here I am again on the pot-holed path, bordered by storm-racked cypresses from which the winter wind has wrenched great branches. Allegra’s grave. The earth still humped up over her and growing dandelion buds, like bandaged heads. Here and there a yellow petal splits away, an emblem of pain. My mother takes her weeder out and a drear and mournful rain begins to fall. She looks up, fidgeting and biting her still-red lip. I dig the hole in the centre of the grave and plant the rose.

  When it’s done my mother turns away to toddle up the path, God knows what she’s feeling. I take the jagged stone out of my pocket and drive it into the earth as hard as I can. ‘There,’ I say to my sister. ‘Sweet dreams.’ Because I feel as if I’m carrying a jagged stone in my belly and that all the juice of my young life is stemmed.

  ‘I couldn’t afford cream,’ my mother says, smudging a hanky up her face. ‘It was seventy cents a thingo.’

  It is the parallel lines in my house I like: the louvres on the bedroom cupboard, the flow of green and white stripes on my counterpane. Lines that, in theory, never meet are always meeting as they come in under windows, through the slats in my bamboo blinds and the uprights of doors. They shift and spill themselves on the paintings all over the badly plastered walls.

  My mother is waiting in the car while I fetch the cream. It is lines I like, the superimposition of form on form … the straight edge of a shelf shadow where it falls on the multicoloured spines of books. Against the bedroom wall my paintings are stacked back-to-front. Once they said I was a bold, adventurous painter, but now they say there’s a difference between troubling and troubled. I have nothing to say as I drop the colours into them, the shadow into shadow, plumbing the dark.

  She is standing inside me, looking out. As I close the door the little woven mat in the hall undulates from one side to the other as slime comes up in my eyes and the tears splash down on the round orange lid of the cream jar in my hands.

  In old age my mother still picks up people with abandon, on trams, in shops, at the meals-on-wheels. As she grows more and more short-sighted, this habit of hers has expanded to include Nauruans, Vietnamese, Czechs, Lithuanians, along with her horde of Australians who happen to bear one or other of the half-dozen surnames such as Taylor, Emery, McVicar or Bloomfield, who could by accident of birth be related to the Mottes.

  These people, netted at bus stops, cornered in banks, trapped in supermarkets, generally end up in her parlour, gazing at the pictorial record of her good works. The giant, aged photo of her grandmother Gilchrist presides from its own chair, the plaster not being of good enough quality to take its nail. On the mantelpiece, in her motherly arms, godchildren of great variety, full-faced, round-eyed, smirk and scowl. She, her sister and brothers, ponder the parade in stages of their youth and age from her sideboard. Granpa and Euphrosyne, their wedding portrait neatly sundered by the pre
ss of time, pass their eternal condemnation on their frivolous daughter, their eyes just visible above the throng. From Greece and Palestine, from Tokyo and Ottawa, the faces, the faces.

  These days, whenever she has occasion, I am exhibited as her pièce de résistance, the single mother. Delivered as the facts are to perfect strangers, my blood immediately leaps to the boil.

  The eyes of the most recent Bloomfield strain, bones creak in her old neck. ‘Such a pity. Such a pretty girl. I’m sorry she was soiled.’

  I leap from my seat.

  ‘Oh, she’s had a good few baths since then,’ my mother sniggers. I feel like hitting her. ‘Sit down, darling. You’re spoiling the view.’ A smirk spirals through her and screws her fat old bottom to the chair. She shunts the old woman’s claw conspiratorially as if I were the prize slide in a slide night. ‘Passionate nature,’ she giggles. ‘Comes from the Italian side of the family. They take umbrage easily. In fact … sit down, darling, there’s a girl … if umbrage were a plant, I doubt whether you could find a pot large enough. But I always think Isobel’s like my sister. Do you remember my sister? Round the jaw especially, here, look.’ And she claws me down to my seat, holds up a studio portrait of Nina beside me and indicates the repetition of her one dubious feature in my face.

  ‘Ye-es. And the nose, if straightened.’

  ‘Not Isobel’s nose, dear. Isobel’s nose is as straight as a die; gave it a good pull every morning for years so it wouldn’t be snub. It was Nina’s nose that needed straightening. Pulling down, I should have thought. She always wore it a mite too high for me. Nina heartily disapproved of poor old Henry, I can tell you.’

  ‘My father was not poor. My father was not old.’

  ‘Exotic of you to have married an Italian. Especially during the war.’

  ‘He was destitute, poor wretch. Didn’t have anywhere to go or anyone to turn to.’