Maud stood for a long time, looking at my question. It never occurred to me that she wouldn’t answer. Well, it occurred to me for just a second. But once she put her glasses on, I knew I was in. Everything slowed down then: I could hear Dobie Squires baring his teeth somewhere in the house and Mum having a go at Dad. Limo-Li was in his backyard, throwing hibiscus cuttings over the fence onto the roof of our shed. That hairless cat sidled across the fence capping in front of me and skidded down the side, all grace and nakedness. And Maud stuck the frontispiece of Alice in Wonderland in her window with her response. It was like our first touch.
And very disappointing. It was a beautiful glossy colour plate. Alice was gazing up into a rich verdant tree, speaking to the Cheshire Cat. She was leaning forward slightly, clasping her hands behind her back with a quizzical expression, lips slightly parted. The Cheshire Cat was fat and orange and soft. Maud had written something in the tree but I couldn’t read it. Not even with the binoculars. I responded:
—Use darker pen can’t see that
Our first touch. How fucking romantic. Trouble was, Limo-Li had absconded with all her drawing materials. That tiny turd of charcoal she had was down to a nub. I watched her rummaging about, opening and closing drawers, until she found something that would show up on top of Alice. Purple lipstick. She wrote in slanting block letters. And she wrote:
—BETTER?
I gave her the thumbs-up and immediately regretted it. The thumbs-up: so Merrill. Then I stuck my original question back on the window.
—Why did you scream?
—BECAUSE I AM MAD
(No contraction of ‘I’ and ‘am’. I notice things like that.)
—What are you mad about?
—NOTHING I JUST MAD
—Angry mad? Sad mad? Crazy mad?
—YES
—I like mad
—WHY?
—Mad is alive
—I AM NOT ALIVE
—You are alive
Each lipstick communiqué had left an imprint on her bedroom window. Her own words in reverse. Patchy, greasy purple hieroglyphs. Maud leaned forward and rubbed at the marks with her thumb, leaving wispy daubs on the glass. It looked as if dozens of tiny winged creatures had been pinned out on the pane for observation. I wrote:
—Windex
And she gave me the thumbs-up.
My Collins Australian Internet-Linked Dictionary (with CD-ROM) defines ‘mad’ as ‘mentally deranged; insane; senseless; foolish; angry; resentful; wildly enthusiastic (about) or fond (of); extremely excited or confused; frantic; temporarily overpowered by violent reactions, emotions etc.; unusually ferocious; with great energy, enthusiasm or haste.’ There’s also a reference to rabies that I don’t think is circumstantially appropriate. But all the rest is. She describes me. Just by being mad, Maud puts me on, like a piece of clothing or purple lipstick. By being mad, she is a thing I have drunk down like Alice’s potion, becoming smaller and smaller until she is a tiny pulse in my stomach, a flicker in my lungs. I’m on her and she’s in me. Or as Maud would say it: I am on her and she is in me. It feels good.
We see each other at school the following week. We don’t speak to each other. It is understood. She doesn’t look at me while I am looking at her, so I can only assume she is looking at me when I am looking somewhere else. It is exciting to be furtive. It is required. This, after all, is not our venue. We have our own place in the space between windows.
TWELVE
Down with the Sickness
—Disturbed (2000)
My conversations with Maud usually last as long as her lipstick does. She has an enormous collection of lipstick, for someone who never wears it. She says her mum always buys her make-up for her birthdays. She says her mum always buys birthday presents for the daughter who lives in her head instead of the one who lives in her house.
—Ask for cash next time
—MUM SAYS THERE NO PLEASURE IN THAT FOR HER
—Fuck we wouldn’t want to deny her
—NANNA GAVE ME CASH AND I DID THIS
Maud lifts her T-shirt then to show me her bellybutton piercing. I’ve seen it before but not like this. Not with this stark consent. She pulls her T-shirt up hard and fast, like a flasher, and holds it bunched at the under-curve of her breasts. Her belly is whiter than I thought and so soft looking. Where mine is sunken, hers pops out a bit, a little fleshy swelling that disappears into her shorts. It’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen. She has an innie bellybutton pierced on the lower lip. A gold sleeper.
—Nice does it get in the way?
—IN THE WAY OF WHAT?
—Anything?
—YOU WANT TO TOUCH IT?
—No
—LIAR
It’s true that I might be lying. I’m not sure. ‘No’ seems like the polite thing to say, but I reckon if I was in the room with her and she asked me, I might have touched her bellybutton ring. I wonder if it is warm to the touch. I wonder if the heat of her body is conducted through the gold like a little electric current.
I’ve never been keen on piercings for myself. I thought about getting one ear done, but apparently there is a gay side. I’m not sure of the etiquette, but I’ve heard that one side of your head is gay and if you get that ear pierced you’re making some sort of statement about your sexuality. Not that there’s anything wrong with gay. Whatever floats your boat. I would just rather not make inadvertent statements about what floats mine. To avoid confusion, I suppose I could get both ears pierced, but that has a big whiff of pirate about it, if you ask me. The only other places left to us guys are the eyebrow and the tongue. Unless you want to go further south. I wonder if pirates are pierced south of the equator. That actually seems like something a pirate would do.
Maud fingers the sleeper a little bit, gives it a little tug. I feel my eyes wince. Then she rolls her T-shirt back into place and leans forward, her palms resting on the windowsill. I pick up the binoculars again. She isn’t looking at me, she is looking down. At the backs of her hands, maybe? Then she picks up that same question and, without looking at it or me, slaps it up against her window.
—YOU WANT TO TOUCH IT?
I can’t decide if this repetition of the question is confrontational or desperate. Or both, or neither. All I know is that it makes me uncomfortable. The way Maud leans against the windowpane, the way her shoulders slump inwards as if she’s been pierced in the chest by something sharp, the way her face is obscured by a tent of hair. I want to see her eyes. I need to see her eyes, to work out what to say back to her. What if I don’t respond the way she wants? What if I don’t respond at all? Is this our first stalemate? Will this same question keep appearing again and again like that uneaten dinner my mother told me would be placed in front of me, meal after meal, until the plate was clean? (I was seven and it was tripe, for god’s sake!) Is this question Maud’s tripe?
Eventually, Maud pushes herself away from the window, letting her question skid down the pane and behind her little desk. That’s when she goes to the portable CD player on the floor next to her bed and starts playing Disturbed. And I give in to her. I hold the binoculars in one hand, write my answer with the other, and flatten it against the glass. The binoculars have never felt heavier. My wrist is shaking. Maud comes back to the window and puts her glasses on.
She just stands there, looking. Then she draws her curtains across and shuts me out.
I didn’t even know she had curtains. And they are hung the wrong way around. You know how the pattern on the curtain is supposed to face into the room? Hers face out. So when she pulls them across, she must be looking at the wrong side of the fabric. Maybe that’s why she never draws them. They are bright yellow, headachy yellow, with little blue Thomas the Tank Engines all over them. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why they’re hung the wrong way around.
Initially a tiny bubble of sad begins to rise in me—worry sad, deep sad. That doesn’t last long. Know where it goes? It rises to my throat, tasting of t
ripe, and falls back into my guts as solid anger. It occurs to me then that there’s no way to win the tripe issue—eat it, don’t eat it, it’s the hesitation that damns you from the get-go. I had written:
—Yes I want to touch it
THIRTEEN
How many greedy epicures would think themselves happy, amidst such a variety of delicate viands as I now carry!
But to me this bitter, prickly Thistle is more savoury and relishing than the most exquisite and sumptuous banquet.
Let others choose what they may for food, but give me, above everything, a fine juicy thistle like this and I will be content.
—Aesop, ‘The Ass Eating Thistles’
We had a cat named Fluffy a while ago. Doomed from the start with a name like that. I believe the names we give our pets are an unequivocal indication of our level of commitment to them. That poor bald thing next door is called Sylvia. That cat is obviously loved. There’s a dog up the street called Antoine. That name’s got substitute child written all over it. And of course there’s our own Dobie Squires (naming accolades to previous owner). The best my mum could come up with for our cat was Fluffy. Not a lot of thought went into that one. Fluffy is the name you give to a disposable cat. A cat that, should it end up tyre gravy, is replaced by the time the kids get home from school, with nothing said. Half the cats in the street are named Fluffy. When Mum called our Fluffy in for tea, they all came. It was like a feline version of The Birds.
Fluffy got old and thin and blind. Started walking in tight circles and howling in the middle of the night. Got to the point where I just wanted to hit her with a rock to put her out of her misery. She must have intuited that, because she started staying away from me. Then one day we found her under the lounge, stiff and twitching. Mum let out a pretty fraught wail, which was odd, considering this was only a Fluffy. Dobie Squires lunged at Mum, taking as his cue the raised volume (he’d started improvising). Dad grabbed Dobie by the hind leg and dragged him towards the kitchen, which caused more screaming because Mum was trying to get in there for a wee nip. And I pulled Fluffy out to watch the death throes.
It’s called post-mortem spasm. I read about it. It’s all about calcium ions and motor proteins. Fluffy might have been in the middle of one of those fidgety dreams of hers, had it not been for the milky pupils and voided bladder. Merrill eventually got a towel and wrapped her up. Mum was having some kind of post-mortem spasm of her own, howling and hiccuping her way through instructions to Dad. She was adamant. Fluffy was not to be buried in the yard. Fluffy was to be taken to the nearest vet and handed in for cremation. Dad started making some noise about the expense of this when he had a perfectly good shovel out back, but Mum was near hysterical by this time. I think that’s when it occurred to me. This wasn’t grief. This was fear. Fear turning into anger. Mum didn’t give a shit about Fluffy. She was just terrified and furious at having a dead thing in her house. She didn’t even want a dead thing in her yard. Dad took Fluffy to the car and drove off. I saw him pop the shovel in the boot first, though.
The curtains at Maud’s window stayed drawn for about a week. Sometimes, if the light was right, I could see her moving around behind them. I could hear her music. I sometimes saw her at school. I spent a lot of time thinking about tripe and humming the theme from Thomas the Tank Engine. I discovered just how closely love, grief and anger are connected. I started reading Far from the Madding Crowd and switched to Aesop when I couldn’t concentrate. Then this morning I get up and the curtains are open. Just like that. I consider ignoring her but realise the binoculars are already in my hand. There is a message in the window. We are on actual text pages of Alice now. Maud has written:
—MY NANNA IS DEAD
The only thing that comes to my mind is Fluffy. I can’t help it. All I can think about is post-mortem spasm and I feel like laughing. Maud’s nanna under a couch, rigid and twitchy and peeing on herself. Psychologists would say that my discomfort with the demise of a relative of the person I love has contributed to my mind choosing to default to a position that removes me from the possibility of having to confront pain in my loved one and empathy within myself in order to reduce my vulnerability. I know they would say that because I’ve read it. I was once interested in the phenomenon of funeral laughter, you see. There’s always one, isn’t there? And at Mrs Green’s funeral, that one was my mum.
Mrs Green ran the local deli. Shocking little place that was never clean and you always had to check the dates on the milk and cheese. Everyone knew her. One day she slipped over while wrapping a tongue. Hit her head on the side of the meat slicer on the way down. That didn’t kill her, though. Apparently, she had a heart attack. Some kids found her on the floor behind the counter with the tongue tucked under her chin.
Most of the street went to the funeral. Mrs Green didn’t have a lot of family, you see. I remember thinking the person who ordered the tongue should have sprung for at least half the cost. I was thinking about that tongue when I felt my mum shaking. I thought she might be crying, at first. Her shoulders were bouncing a little and her breaths were short and fast. Then I heard the giggle.
If you’re at a funeral, a giggle, to other people, is as shocking as a fart. The unfortunate thing was that Mum just couldn’t get a hold of herself. She sat there, trying to suppress these giggles, which only ended up producing giggle-suppression snorts. When people started to look, Dad leaned over and hissed, ‘Shut the hell up,’ which sort of made her worse. I was fascinated by the whole thing because it remains, to this day, one of the only times I have ever seen my mother laugh. Our family were not invited to the annual Christmas party at Antoine’s house that year. I think I was the only one who had some compassion for my mum that day. Death is a little bit funny, after all. Isn’t it?
So there she is, Maud, standing in the window. Telling me her nanna is dead. Exposing herself. Coming out from behind Thomas the Tank Engine to share something. Something I assume is painful. And what do I do? I default to Fluffy and post-mortem spasm and tongue and before I know what’s happening I feel my shoulders bouncing and my face shaking and I am laughing. I am laughing big. Not just a titter. Not a simple chuckle that with distance could be misinterpreted as the facial contortions of shared sorrow. I’m laughing my fucking head off and I can’t stop. Maud’s just watching me, expressionless, pulling out her hair.
FOURTEEN
Not only do I not know what’s going on, I wouldn’t know what to do about it if I did.
—George Carlin
All the girls at school have Pandora bracelets. Or the cheaper imitations. It has become the newest obsession, replacing things like violence and eating disorders at the top of the list. You see the girls sitting in little groups at lunchtime, all bent over each other, wrists extended, heads tweaked coquettishly to the side, stroking each other’s bracelets and making sexy noises at one another. I know about all this because I watch them. I was walking along the school verandah behind Caitlin Cooper (good name for a loved pet there) when her Pandora bracelet broke. There was no warning before a dozen or so charms and beads hit the concrete, ping, ping, ping; they skidded everywhere. Caitlin actually wailed and her entire pack dropped to the ground as if responding to a volley of gunfire. The girls crawled along on their hands and knees, rescuing the trinkets, barking at the approaching foot traffic to stay back. It was as if little pieces of Caitlin herself had broken off and rolled away. A tiny solid gold apple charm, complete with minuscule stem and leaf, ended up resting against my foot. I picked it up and pocketed it before walking away.
Here’s the thing—it was little pieces of Caitlin herself breaking off. Apparently, these charms are symbolic. The little apple? Caitlin wants to be a teacher one day. Get it? Apple for the teacher? Isn’t that so precious you just want to vomit? By the way, those girls are back there again today, still looking for that little gold apple.
Carl Jung reckons that symbols are signs of things that can’t be made clear. If we are so consumed with protecting the bit
s of us that could break off and roll away at any given moment, then it makes sense that we have symbols to represent us. Symbols for others and symbols for ourselves. Do we, therefore, symbolically display our agendas? Like a monkey presenting its red arse when it’s ready for a date? Of course, that raises an even more interesting question. If something can’t be made clear, how do you assign it a symbol? Isn’t its essential obscurity a symbol in and of itself?
I think about this while rolling the little gold apple around in my palm. I also think there is every possibility that Carl Jung was just full of shit. However, there can be no denying we humans are a phlegmatic lot. Introspection being actively discouraged since birth, it makes perfect sense that we should eventually choose tattoos or loud cars with big exhaust pipes or boob jobs or Pandora bracelets to define ourselves. And why not? All honesty is relative.
Creepy and Maud Page 5