THIRTY-TWO
It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.
—attributed to Oscar Wilde
It took me a long time to find the right book. I was following the other Maud in the school library when I found it. It is thick and old, bound in what used to be red cloth, now faded to rust. It has that old crispy paper with torn fore-edges and a frontispiece dappled with foxing. Smells fusty-sweet. Some idiot has repaired the spine with fibreglass tape. I thought: this is the one. An adventure story. A great French romance. Like our story. I quickly stuffed the book inside my jacket and walked out. Backpacks are no longer permitted in the school library due to an increase in theft.
The other Maud sits in front of me in History. She’s in a couple of my other classes, too. Her hair is a different sort of red, maybe a bit blonder, and she ties it back and she has freckles on her neck. Sometimes I watch her and pretend she’s Maud. I follow her from class to class. I watch her at lunchtime, sitting on the grass. She has lots of friends and I think she has a boyfriend, too. She doesn’t even look like Maud but sometimes I make her Maud and watch her and follow her and it makes me feel a bit better.
I miss seeing my Maud every day.
My new school is one of those very fashionable private alternative schools with high fees, what they call a contemporary teaching philosophy and seemingly no one in charge. They have a very forgiving attendance policy, no uniforms, and a pastoral care class that is exactly what I imagine group therapy would be like. Everyone gets to call the teachers by their first names, too, but not in a Mike the chaplain kind of way. Not all of this information is in the brochure. The buildings are ugly, the grounds expansive and neglected, and the library full of rich-smelling treasures with pages the colour of urine. The sort of books you only get by attending estate sales and appealing to the public for donations. I keep to myself. I watch the others. I have no nickname here, no reputation, no expectations. I like this school. I will never admit this to anyone.
I have been shunted as far from the mainstream as possible while still allowing for the fact that Mum and Dad want to be able to say their son is in the private school system.
My days of watching the real Maud are numbered. My Maud is going into a residential treatment program. That’s what she calls it, anyway. I suspect it’s really just a hospital with chores and a pastoral care class attached. She goes in a week. I am going to visit her there. She doesn’t know this yet, but that is my plan. Our love story turned into an adventure story. Perhaps I will write to her, as well, like in the old days when people were separated by war, oceans, disease. In a nineteenth-century novel, Maud would be committed to a sanatorium with something glamorous like tuberculosis and I would write to her in sweeping longhand and seal the letter with wax. Or is she Typhoid Mary, banished to an island, not because she is sick but because her very presence can sicken others?
I spend as much time as possible watching her, not just because I don’t know when she’ll be back but because I don’t know who she’ll be when she gets back.
Maud’s mum has bought her luggage. It’s all sort of forced festive over there now, as if Maud is going on holiday. Her mum smiles a lot and is overly animated. Doing the big sell, I suppose. It’s nice luggage: a suitcase with a pull-out handle and wheels, a smaller vanity case (probably for Maud’s lipstick and curlers), a matching shoulder bag. All of which her mum demonstrates like a spokes-model.
So, with the book chosen, a simple adventure story, something to look forward to, something to come back for, I now have to get the etiquette just right.
Did you know that the word etiquette comes from the French verb estiquer, which means ‘to attach’? How appropriate. I’ll tell Maud this. She’ll like it.
Maud going away is my tragedy, but I’m sure as hell not going over there with a plate of sandwiches. I have to take something, though. Something for the hostess. The solution presents itself with a rattle and a drool. Too much? I grab my little prisoner of war and tuck her under my arm. Years ago, when Merrill still fantasised about me fulfilling his expectations as a son, he bought me an expensive sports bag with a towel and refillable water bottle in it. Sylvia has been sleeping in it. I grab that, as well, and throw the book in. I am Gulliver on the threshold of a great journey.
I go downstairs. Dad is at the kitchen table doing a sudoku puzzle because he thinks it will stave off Alzheimer’s. Mum is doing dishes, I think.
Me: What’s the woman next door called?
Mum spins around so fast she sloshes some Ribena out of her tumbler. It’s been so long since I’ve spoken to either of them, spoken at all, in fact, that she actually looks a bit confused, as if I’ve accosted her with a conversational French question. Dobie Squires sees Sylvia in my arms and starts barking with a savagery usually reserved for gitah.
Mum: What? Why aren’t you at school?
Me: Little early, isn’t it, Mum?
Mum: Merrill, shut the damn dog up.
Dad: Where are you taking the cat?
Mum: Isn’t that the neighbours’ cat?
Me: I found it. Woman next door’s name?
Mum: Merrill, please! The dog! Where did you find the cat?
Me: In my room. What’s the woman next door called?
Mum: Well, how on earth did it get in there?
Dad: Yes, how on earth did it get in there?
Mum: For Christ’s sake, Merrill, do something about the dog. I can’t hear myself think or speak.
Me: Limo-Li’s wife. Her name?
Mum: Whose wife? Merrill, I’m not going to ask you again. I can’t stand all this fucking noise first thing in the morning. Please.
Dad: Tell him to get the cat out of here.
Me: Lionel’s wife. Her name.
Mum: The cat has nothing to do with it. You could shut the dog up if you wanted to. You’re pissing me off deliberately. You know I didn’t sleep well and this is very passive-aggressive, I just can’t believe...
Dad: Beverly.
Mum: ... that you do this to me, upset me on purpose, you know what it is, it’s mean, it’s just fucking nasty, and I’ve had it, Merrill, are you smiling, are you actually smiling...
Dad: Bev.
Mum: ... I don’t have to take this from you, or your damn dog, and you know another thing...
I am quietly impressed by this tirade. I don’t believe it would have lasted as long as it has done without the presence of Sylvia. There is no way Dobie Squires is going to be focused enough to gitah while there is a cat in the room. I think Mum knows this.
I don’t just cross our respective front lawns. I walk out onto the street and up Maud’s footpath to her front door, like a proper visitor. Maud’s mum has pot plants on her verandah that have all died. They were once well loved. I can tell that from the quality of the pots. I alternate between ringing the bell and banging on the leadlight panel in the front door because I know this will be most irritating. When the door swings open, Maud’s mum is irritated. I am ready.
Me: Hello, Bev. Have you got my mum’s casserole dish?
Bev: Casserole...?
Me: Dish.
The light goes on and I have her on the back foot. She hasn’t even noticed the cat.
Bev: Oh, oh, yes! I forgot all about that. I’ll get it for you. Come in, come in.
Bev rummages about in a cupboard under the sink and pulls out the casserole dish. Both base and lid are wrapped in newspaper and then wrapped again in a plastic shopping bag. She never meant to keep it. In the midst of death, divorce and insanity, she simply put it away and forgot about it. I reward her immediately, holding out the cat like I would a plate of sandwiches.
Me: I found your cat.
Bev: Oh, my god ... oh, Sylv-yah ... oh, baby girl! You got fat!
Me: Just ducking up to see Maud.
Bev: Who?
I take the stairs two at a time. I’ve never been in this house before and it takes me a minute, wh
en confronted with a hallway of closed doors, to work out which one will be Maud’s. I discover a towel cupboard and a bathroom on my first two attempts. Nice bathroom. Lots of chrome and ice-cream coloured tile.
Maud is standing in front of her bedroom window, looking out, across our space, into my empty room. I see myself for the first time as she has been seeing me.
She says nothing. She lifts one bare hand, finger bones folding at the hinges, and pats the elfin remains of her hair. A small gauche gesture that breaks my heart. She looks a bit broken herself. I think about stuffing her in my gym bag and running home, hiding her in my room and feeding her liver treats until her little belly protrudes again. But then she smiles. And it’s like reconnecting the electricity in a derelict house. I feel happy.
Me: I will come to see you. I’ll visit you as much as you like. Or not at all. Whatever you like. I will come to see you. I’ve brought you something.
I get the book out of the sports bag. She sits on the end of her bed, and I sit beside her. I begin to read:
‘The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy. Chapter One. Paris: September, 1792. A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate.’
Me: That’s good stuff, hey? Shall I keep going?
Maud: Yes. And you will come to see me?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Every effort has been made to secure permissions where necessary. The sources of quoted material are cited within the text, except in chapter SIX: Creepy’s message to Maud is from The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1912), and in chapter TWENTY-EIGHT: Creepy’s message to Maud is from ‘The Rape of the Lock’ by Alexander Pope (1712).
The quote from ‘How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later’ by Philip K. Dick, copyright ©1978, is used by permission of Philip K. Dick Estate.
The quote from On the Road by Jack Kerouac, copyright ©1955, 1957; renewed ©1983 by Stella Kerouac, renewed ©1985 by Stella Kerouac and Jan Kerouac, is used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The quote in chapter TWENTY by P.J. O’Rourke, copyright ©, is used by permission Grove/Atlantic Inc. New York.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dianne Touchell is a middle child who feared Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy—and any other stranger who threatened to break into the house at night. She has worked, among other things, as a nightclub singer, a fish and chip shop counter girl (not with Pauline Hanson) and a bookseller. Dianne would rather talk to her dog than answer the phone.
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BACK COVER MATERIAL
I am in love with the girl next door. Our windows are almost opposite each other’s, over the side fence.
I call her Maud. That’s not her real name but that’s what I call her. She’s sort of shortish and curvy. Titian hair. No freckles. A dark, smudgy birthmark on the back of her left calf. A nose piercing her dad knows about and a bellybutton piercing I assume he doesn’t. All right, so I have spent a bit of time looking in there.
Am I sounding creepy? Love is sort of creepy. When you fall in love, you presuppose all sorts of things about the person. You superimpose all kinds of ideals and fantasies on them. You create all manner of unrealistic, untenable, unsatisfiable criteria for that person, automatically guaranteeing their failure and your heartbreak. And what do we call it? Romance. Now, that’s creepy.
Creepy and Maud Page 13