Last Days of Ava Langdon

by Mark O'Flynn

  Ava can sense she’s rambling. She’s driving the old woman away. Pushing her before she leaps. However, Poppy won’t be driven. Instead she says:

  ‘But Ava, after today, we do know each other.’

  Ava stops talking. Did she hear that right? What a lovely thing. Someone, a living person who knows her. They touch hands again – both hands small, one of them powdered with talcum. Ava turns and lumbers downhill towards the bush track at the bottom. It’s all her legs can do to stop her rolling down like a ball of dough. There are too many stories in her mind. Ava wonders what Theo would have made of the encounter. And Poppy, too, gazing after her until Ava, growing smaller and smaller, disappears into the scrub, and a Red-browed Firetail begins its high-pitched seee.

  * * *

  Past the ordered tombstones of the Anglican section towards the bush track at the bottom of the hill, a pile of grave dirt lies next to a newly dug hole with a tin lid laid over the top to keep the rain out. Ava considers the dirt as if it is somehow different from ordinary dirt. Tomorrow’s entertainment for some poor chap. Keep moving, old girl, she tells herself – and to her legs: don’t seize up now.

  Along the track Ava at last feels she has escaped the clutches of the hospital and its henchmen. Having that place so close to the cemetery is no accident of town planning, she thinks, and further on is the town tip. Draw your own conclusions. She feels she has fooled them all, hospital staff and devil included, yet at the same time, the bush seems to be hemming her in, the trees looming over like the contemplative fingers of a malevolent creator. A child holding a bug captive in its hands, enjoying the sensation of the creature struggling to escape.

  Around a bend, over the bicycle humps along the track, she encounters a dog fossicking for smells amongst the roots of some tea-tree. The dog, a blue heeler, battle scars on its snout, looks up at her, ears erect and alert. It growls. It looks like an evil thing. Ava reaches for her machete only to realise afresh that it’s gone. She can picture exactly where she left it in that damned bloody buggering thieving hospital. Her best knife.

  She growls back. It doesn’t move. Now there’s no such thing as a malevolent creator. No devil in a white coat. There is only her and this dog. Ava looks around and sees a stick by the side of the track. It’s not as thick as she’d like but she picks it up. In the wilderness two living things and one stick. Their simultaneously beating hearts.

  ‘Here, poochy; here, pooch,’ she calls.

  She realises that the dog is a bitch, its dugs hanging down all swollen and stretched. It must have pups somewhere.

  ‘Where are your pups, eh? Pooch? Where are your babies?’

  She talks soothingly to it, her tone contradicted somewhat by the stick. The balance tips. In an instant the dog turns and runs along the track, disappearing from sight. It must have been able to read her thoughts. It imagined the future. She is alone. The trees lean over her, creaking like bones. Lingering drops of rainwater fall from the leaves and tap on the ground. Birds here too. Seee. Ava limps on through the scrub and hears the bush whispering. Her leg throbs and her duodenum is aching; she’s sure they’ve missed something there. That’ll teach them, if she explodes from peritonitis of the duodenum. She uses the stick as a makeshift crutch. The dog has gone, the world’s complexities reducing one element at a time. The light is gradually fading. Who is holding that lantern with its wick turned down so low? Maybe a dog holds the last gleam of light loose in its jaws, so that its drool runs down and snuffs the waning flame out. Where will she be then? For the moment it’s just her and the stick. Oh, and the track.

  The distance to be traversed.

  She passes the soldiers’ cricket oval and emerges from the bush onto the suburban streets which stretch out from the highway, these streets she knows so well, like the veins in her legs. There are no footpaths here. She passes the frames of new houses being built and older homes behind tall barricades of rhododendron and photinia, all the scenes of domestic anguish, for how could such jollity be real? The swings and roundabouts of outrageous fortune. The fine fences and fine neighbours. The house of the boy who abuses her – and here he is, playing in his front yard with a ball. No, you could hardly call it playing. Conniving. Conspiring. Perhaps this is where the dog escaped from. The boy looks up from his merciless game.

  ‘Garn, you old nut case.’

  ‘Eddie, get in here,’ comes the other voice from behind the curtain in the window.

  * * *

  If only she had another life, would that be any better? How to begin comprehending the mind of another? But isn’t that her job, to plumb the murky depths of another person’s experience? Well, if not exactly plumb the depths, then at least scratch the surface, get under their skin like a grain of salt on a slug’s tail. And if she could, how would they, therefore, see her?

  It’s a small town. She’s not sure of the population but she may as well know everything about everybody. She may as well know what it’s like to be a ten-year-old boy. She may as well know that Eddie Tebbit runs around the side of his house, immune to the cooling temperature of the air. It’s a big house with wooden walls. Eddie has lived there all his life, so she may as well know everything.

  She knows that Eddie must be sick of watching the witchy old bat dawdle past his fence. He’ll get out of harm’s way. He’ll go round the back. There is a piece of rope with a stick tied to it which is tied to a tall tree. Sometimes words skip around in his mouth like marbles rattling against his teeth. He swings on his rope swing but it isn’t as much fun by yourself, and after a while it makes you dizzy. There is a sandpit but he has outgrown that. There are weeds growing in it. There is his broken spade. He knows where there is a hibernating lizard.

  Ava decides, yes, after his fun with the old lady Eddie Tebbit is surely bored. The mind of a ten-year-old boy is not a difficult contraption. He thinks about climbing the tree which has red sap dribbling out of it and ants eating the sap and sometimes birds eating the ants. He doesn’t know what sort of a tree it is and doesn’t care. From the top there is a view of the graveyard and the tip. The mind of a ten-year-old boy, thinks Ava, must be fraught with the most exquisite dilemmas. Eddie thinks about a boy called Paul Winston who has traded – traded under the threat of force – his broken watch for Eddie’s favourite stone. Eddie has a bag of cats’-eyes, taws, tom-bowlers, bumbos, pee-wees and crocks of many different colours. His largest marble was his cannonball, the king of all marbles. His prized trophy. Not a word to be used in public but Eddie thinks it was beautiful, the veins and flaws in it that caught the light. Was and caught because Paul Winston, being older and a better player, won all of Eddie’s marbles at keepsies and then, laughingly, said he would trade them back for the cannonball. He would even throw in his broken watch. Eddie, close to tears, agreed. No one understands the importance of marbles. He had no choice. Ava can imagine the intensity of the contest. Then Paul Winston promptly went and lost the cannonball while mucking around in the orchard. Eddie has thrown the watch away.

  He wonders if he should follow the old witch from down the road again and spy on what she gets up to. He has probably seen her rolling rocks around outside her hut, building things. Sometimes she laughs out loud to herself. See the old witch laughing out loud. He has probably seen her hang her big white shit-catchers on the line, which is nothing but a bit of old rope strung between two trees. They are the sort of shit-catchers that witches wear. She never spots him hiding in the bushes. He is too clever; besides, he is a fast runner, so it wouldn’t matter if she does, but she never does. Except that one time when she caught him setting fire to a clump of elephant grass and took his matches. And grabbed him by the ear. And when he tried to run grabbed his hair. And frightened him. Frightened him utterly. Oh, Ava remembers that.

  And now he must be hungry. He flings open the back door with a bang.

  ‘Mu-um,’ he yells.

  ‘What?’ comes the reply.<
br />
  ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘Have some bread and butter.’

  Mrs Tebbit is in the lounge room attacking the ironing. Ava can picture the whole barren interior. Through the curtains Mrs Tebbit has seen the old woman hobble past, as she does most days. Watching Ava, Mrs Tebbit perhaps recognises her own well-trodden towpath, although her pathways are of a smaller, more ordered, more domestic nature. Or perhaps she doesn’t recognise this at all. It’s easier to imagine barren interiors than it is the innermost thoughts of a ten-year-old child. She has heard her son call out at Ava – Garn – and wishes that he wouldn’t, but what can she do? Belt it out of him? Nag it out of him? He’s ten. There are bigger battles.

  ‘What’s for dinner?’

  ‘Dinner’s not ready. Have you been leaving that old lady alone?’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘Because I don’t want you annoying her.’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘I don’t want you going anywhere near her.’

  ‘No, Mum.’

  He makes a sour face. But then forgets about the outside world because it is nearly time for The Munsters followed by F Troop.

  Ava imagines a new scenario: Mrs Tebbit wondering if she should chase after the old lady. (That’s me, thinks Ava, I’m the old lady.) Mrs Tebbit doesn’t even know her name, which isn’t very neighbourly. She wonders if she should catch her up, apologise for Eddie’s behaviour, ask her if she’s all right, she seems to be limping. Does she have enough food out there in her shack? Why, thank you, my dear, I’m heartened by your concern. She wonders if she should, but she doesn’t. She watches the old lady go. Mr Tebbit will be home soon and he will deal with the boy.

  * * *

  Ah, Mr Tebbit, how many crimes have been committed in thy name? Ava realises she has no inkling as to what Mr Tebbit looks like. She scurries on, head down, wretched, trying to be invisible. There is nowhere to hide. The boy has conjured all her ghosts again. If she had her machete she’d chase him into the house, chop him up and throw him in the stew pot. How dearly she would love to chop someone up and throw them in the stew pot. She scurries past the orchard – she still has a few figs in her pocket, cut to shreds by the broken glass.

  Swami Apogee, her hair up in a turban, is on her verandah, saluting the afternoon light and the going down of the sun. She waves to Ava but Ava does not stop. She cannot fabricate that story. All the tangents bouncing off her like moths off a light bulb. At the edge of the orchard, where its neat European definition blurs back into the bush, Ava steps amongst the trees. In her stealthy, trespassing way Ava loves the orchard. She wishes Angus & Robertson had bought that for her instead of the hut. The orchard reminds her of the honeyed past, when things were clear and simple, when life had a different charter, when she loved and was loved. When the sky was aflame with possibility. She can remember the passage exactly:

  magenta clouds, iridescent, tortured, like a skin disease. Engels had (reluctantly) given us our apple money (minus compensation for a new pair of spectacles). The orchard was stripped bare, apart from a few tip-top leavings the tallest ladders couldn’t reach, there for the birds. Share and share alike, we thought. The leaves of the trees hung down, looking somehow assaulted or shamed, as if they had lost a fight, or a marriage. But they would recover. Next season would be a pearler. You could tell from the formative buds lined along the branches. Our last picking money amounted to a tidy pile and we could, indeed, go anywhere. Our pockets bulged with cash. We were liberated.

  ‘I hear they’re picking oranges up Shepparton way,’ I said, cogitating.

  Red was tying up the strap to her swag.

  ‘You know, Dave, I think I’ve done my dash with oranges.’

  ‘Never,’ I remonstrated.

  ‘Peas. Cherries. Peaches. Beans too. The works. I’ve had it up to here.’

  She saluted her hairline.

  ‘Not apples?’

  ‘Apples as well. Listen, my shoulders hurt. My fingers hurt. Look at these calluses. My back aches. My arms are scratched to blazes. I’ve got a rash on my collarbone here where the apple sack drags. I’ve had enough.’

  She showed me her arms, her calluses, her rash. I wanted to kiss their aches and pains away, to soothe them back to a more sensible state of thinking about things. Think with the body, Red, not the mind. Life isn’t rational. I wanted to give her the emollient of my kisses.

  This is what she has tried to capture in her work. This love returns to her as she wanders between the trees, and in some trampled grass she spies a rock. It’s a round rock, unusual for hereabouts, where the rocks are mostly split bits of sandstone. Ironstone too, which is said to attract the lightning during storms. (For a while Ava thought it was her.) But a round, spherical rock – a river rock, although there are no rivers up here, it’s about the size of a small loaf of bread or a human noggin, speckled with mica and feldspar – lying in the orchard as if burped up out of the earth. It’s as though it has signalled to her. Perhaps an old orchardist once dug it up and ever since it’s lain still waiting for the next phase of its destiny. She wonders if that’s too strong a phrase for it, to think of a rock as having a destiny.

  Ava picks it up and carries it home, not far now. It’s certainly heavier than a loaf of bread. Down to the end of the road, to the shack behind a solitary, upright telegraph pole, number 1584. Someone will treasure that number one day. It’s the end of the road; beyond it, nothing but the endless flammable bush. She picks her way through the wattles just about to burst into a big breath of blossom. And here is her old bus full of treasures, patches of lichen on its yellow fenders. And here is her chimney. And here are her four fibro walls which guard her boxes of rejected manuscripts, each one four hundred pages long and typed on rose-coloured paper. Each encapsulating an aspect of her life, the romance of it, the creative force of it. Culminating in this day, this stone. Her life. One of the cats is waiting for her. No fresh aneurysm of feathers on the welcoming stone. She unlocks the wooden door. She goes in and tips her new discoveries onto the table. First the rock. Then, from her calico bag: the paints, the ream of paper, the sherry. Bugger, she has forgotten to get the Weeties. She twists the cap off the second bottle and quaffs a good slug. Home. The still, quiet air within. The typewriter is grinning at her. She heaves a big, homecoming sigh. Mission accomplished.

  Every moment of every day, there’s your raw materials.

  Beneath her boots the floorboards creak where they don’t quite meet the joists. It’s a sound she has grown immune to. She places the rose ream beside the typewriter and its grin broadens. All those ideas percolating in her brain, soon they’ll pop like pollen: the clouds like maggots, the clay made from spittle, the threads of coincidence. She inserts her hand and pricks her finger on a sliver of broken glass nesting there with the punctured figs. She turns the pocket inside out and brushes the smaller fragments of glass onto the floor, sweeps them out the door with her straw broom. How domesticated. She hangs the coat on the back of the chair, as if someone has come to visit her. There are incisions in the pocket’s cloth.

  She opens the drawer in the sideboard and rummages through it. What a lot of crap she has accumulated: candle stubs, old corks, dead batteries, a gardening fork, a box of bandaids, screws, nails, pins, a withered clove of garlic with a green horn curling out of it, hairclips, cotton reels, an old pirn, a hacksaw blade, a little jar of nutmeg, stray matches, string, some beeswax, paper clips, a lifeless torch, stiffened orange peel, a knot of ginger, an egg whisk, shoelaces, paintbrushes with bristles hardened into stone, milk bottle tops, an old razor blade, a tape measure that has spewed its spool, and right at the bottom a dusty accretion of broken moths. Plus her photos and correspondence. There are letters from Hal Porter, Douglas Stewart, Ruth Park, Miles Franklin, as well as all the others. There is an old crumpled letter, one of many, yellowing now, addressed to Oscar Wilde. She knows its insults by h
eart as they rise again with her bile. A most insensitive lack of reticence in her personal affairs. Oscar scoffs at that with withering scorn. He whom they laughed at in the dock, laughed at for loving, laughed at and locked away. She shoves the letter back. No more bullshit. She’ll give them shapeless; she’ll give them superfluous.

  This isn’t what she’s looking for. She fossicks further. Here at the back of the drawer, she comes up with her tin snips, a trifle dull and rusty though perfectly functional, like a critic’s acumen. She takes them outside and goes to the eviscerated shell of the old bus. She is proud of her bus, crumbs of sunlight flaking off it onto the dirt. She has tried to establish a little rockery around it, but knows it is a futile attempt to keep the bush at bay. Inside, amongst some milk urns and piles of old newspapers, she finds what’s left of her roll of chicken wire. She doesn’t need one of the smaller scraps scattered about the house. She peels off a length and spreads it out and cuts through the width of it with her snips. Each click a satisfying moment, as though she were snipping through the fingers of – who? A husband? A critic? A foul-mouthed boy? So many people she would like to take a pair of tin snips to. She knows that’s not very pacific of her. The wire curls up more as each strand is cut. She even hums a little tune.

  It takes a while, but eventually she has a square of chicken wire just the right size. She takes it back inside the hut and lays it on the table. The light is starting to lean across the sky. She picks up the round rock, her stone head, and sits it in the middle of the wire square. She folds up each side, cutting some incisions into the wire so they will come together neatly. They do. There is a top knot of wire at the apex, which she carefully snips off. She sutures some of the loose strands together so they hold. There. When the rock is wrapped she cuts open some brown paper bags and wraps the wired stone in that outer skin. A short piece of string tied up to hold the whole lot together like a Christmas pudding. There, get out of that straitjacket, she thinks, I did. She picks up the parcel and places it on the bread board. That will have to do. That will have to atone for the loss of her helmet and her machete. Whatever else it represents she would have trouble explaining. It’s also taken her mind off her leg, which is starting to tingle.