It gave me the opportunity to gasp, what were you painting—Harold?
He postponed his meal. Perhaps wondering whether the sprat was a bigger fish than he had bargained for, the silvery blue of the eyes became dazzling underwater spotlights.
‘The movement of forms,’ he told me ‘through space by natural reaction, I mean nothing can resist nature’s will though it may not be immediately visible to the obtuse human eye.’
Harold’s inhuman eye was obviously daring me to resist.
‘I always fail in what I set out to do,’ his chest twangled despairingly ‘and cannot persuade myself, like some artists, that truth lies in failure and the unknowable.’
He suddenly bends, and sticks the thin tip of a tongue which a moment before had been broad and furry, into my right ear, almost as deep as the drum it sounded at the moment of penetration.
‘Do you understand, darling?’ he laughs, ‘I bet you do.’
‘I would like to draw you Irene, on your bed—without your clothes—charming though they are.’
Without waiting for an answer, he picked me up and dumped me on the bed, and started arranging pillows, and arranging, and from there might have begun tearing at my clothes as though they were the wrapping of a parcel which prevented him getting at its contents quick enough.
When I’ve got to know you. Got your form and texture by heart I mean—I think we’ll have a cat to elongate beside you, a big blue Persian with angry eyes and pink tongue.
It gave me my opportunity.
‘I don’t think Aunt Alison likes them. I don’t think I do either. They make me itch and sneeze.’
‘I knew it! You’re turning out to be a dreary Philistine like all the others—and your Greek skin offers enormous tonal difficulties beside the blue cat I visualise.’
Outside, the kookaburra is tearing the garden apart. A cloud of finches and wrens are shedding their breast feathers as they beat against the glass.
‘Let me see your nipples at least.’
Harold’s hands which I had thought soft and pink are as hard and dry as turpentine has made them, with soot in the cracks.
I might have lost, knotting with those hard hands, if a worse clatter had not set up, competing with the kookaburra. I realised it was Alison, those scuffed brogues marching through her house.
Harold breathed, Oh Lord, and slithered quietly in the opposite direction, into the garden, only upsetting a garbage bin.
‘Ireen?’ Alison calls. ‘Where are you?’ and on charging through the doorway of my room, ‘What are you doing?’
‘Thinking.’
She was looking like a thin hen somebody with evil intentions had been chasing through the heat.
‘Not very healthy, lying on your bed, on a fine afternoon.’
It was Alison who was looking unhealthy.
‘Who won the match?’
‘It isn’t over. I left because I have a migraine coming on. The Parmores will bring the little ones back. The men can look after themselves.’
Apparently satisfied nobody else was in ill health, she went stamping out to the bathroom. ‘Cricket!’ she moaned, tablets rattling like dice in a tumbler, till a slosh of water silenced them.
‘I don’t expect somebody kind would like to make me a cup of tea,’ she called back.
‘That’s just what I’m doing. Or at any rate I’ve put the kettle on.’ It was Harold in the kitchen.
Ally could not have known what to answer. So I left them to their shared silence, or the argument they were brewing for when the kettle blew its whistle. I went into the garden.
This sad, sandy patch, all clothesline and failed vegetables, lacy cabbages, scribbley peas, rambling pumpkins. In Australia it is virtuous to grow your own vegetables while conning the greengrocer into selling you his wilting varieties cheap. The Lockhart garden is full of Ally’s failures—and Harold’s avoidances. And birds which nobody notices as they knock off the grubs Ally’s vegetable ventures encourage. And cats—here for the birds, and more particularly, the overturned garbage bins—toms with swollen cheeks growling over chop-bones. Harold does not recognise cats, unless the aesthetic ones with tonal values. Ally sees them only when she drives past in her old car through a loneliness of lantana scrub.
Does Ally’s car correspond to the tree-house Gil and I built and left behind. No, we didn’t. We were only forced.
One of the predatory cats stalked across the scuffed sandy ‘lawn’ flicking an angry tail. She sat for a moment preening herself with a licked paw. I should not have dismissed cats in my conversation with Harold, saying they made me sneeze and itch. A handy lie—I have never known a cat. But would like to. I feel very close to them. I would love to stroke a cat’s fur, from its bat’s ears down to the tip of its snake’s tail. Cleonaki would not have permitted an animal.
After she had done her face, (this slinky tortoiseshell could only have been a female—no swollen-cheeked, moth-eaten tom) she loped swiftly across the lawn into the lacy cabbages, and re-appeared in exit over the grey paling fence.
Almost at once the back door whammed. Harold, too, was making an exit. Where the lovely tortoiseshell loped, Harold stalked while hoping any observer might see it as a normal walk. Harold was taking the shortcut through a gap in the fence to the track which leads to the ferry. As he crossed the lawn I might not have existed. He looked through me, dismissing an experience which had not turned out the way he would have had it go. Only for an instant the eyes turned on, and you felt he might be saving you up for the future. Squeezing sideways through the gap in the grey palings (the stomach would only just make it) a shred of the exquisitely tonal gear was left behind on a rusty nail. The last of Harold drifted back as a muttered, ‘Fuck.’
There was nothing to keep me, so I went back inside.
Ally called, ‘Who’s that?’ and at once more hopefully, ‘Is it Ireen?’
She was stretched out on her bed in her slip, a strip of wetted lint covering her eyes. Her temporary blindness should have made it easier to face her. But I felt guilty. It wasn’t only for Harold’s behaviour, and her relationship with my mother, it was for the whole undisguised shambles of Ally Lockhart in an old beige slip: the bruises on her shins, the thin strips of what had been breasts, the flaking lips in a face the weather had roughed and reddened. I have never stroked a cat. I should have been able to stroke my aunt if I hadn’t felt so paralysed. At least she would have hated it (or so I think), and that let me off a little of my guilt.
Perhaps it was from not being able to see me that she became more confidential than ever in the past. What she resented most was callousness in human beings, by which she meant men—husbands. She went so far as to name him. Men’s bodies last better than women’s and husbands take advantage of it.
‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this,’ she said. ‘A child. But children, specially you, Ireen—know more today—too much—and at the same time not enough. You can’t—the experience of life. I wish I had had a girl child…’ After letting you see everything to put you off womanhood. But wanted you to share her suffering. ‘Those boys of mine will grow into men and despise me for being old, ugly, and their slave. Sometimes I think I’d rather have a poof. Might too. Good God, no. I can’t possibly.’
Presently we hear the little ones clattering in from the street. Ally’s back arches on the bed and she tears the bandage off her eyes. ‘What if the Parmores? That would be the last straw! No, Col and Wal will have given them enough. And they wouldn’t want to face the boring mother…’ So she sinks back. ‘Be a darling, Ireen, and feed them. You’re so capable…’ she sighs.
Fortunately Col and Wal are still munching popcorn and sucking lollies. They want nothing. Hardly notice you are there. Run into what was once their room, to fetch a few toys. You hear the door slam in the writing table. As you go in to protect your secrets, the key tinkles on the floorboards.
Col asks, clutching his Donald Duck, ‘What are you always writing, Reenee? Is it a sto
ry?’
‘Yes, a story.’
Wal asks ‘What about, Reen?’
‘The lot of us.’
They have a giggle.
‘Will you read it to us?’
‘No need.’
More giggles as they run out to the veranda, Wal scattering bits of his meccano set.
Tonight I am the meccano set no-one will ever put together, even if all the bits are there.
* * *
Whatever got into you to keep a diary. Safer to share your secrets with a mirror. Shan’t write any more. Ought to destroy it but think of all those little white moths taking wing, spreading the news. Burn it? Under the wad of tinkling carbon the core of the matter will lie waiting to be read. Steamy emotions are difficult to kindle. You have strung the key to the drawer on a chain, and wear it round your neck. Even this is dangerous.
‘Ah, keepsakes,’ Harold says at breakfast in the toneless voice with which he clothes his most feeling censure. ‘I wonder whose snap has pride of place in Irene’s locket.’
Bruce sniggers, ‘Lionel Manley perhaps!’
Keith comes in with ‘Lionel Manley? You don’t say! There’s a fair few of the girls have crushes on Lionel the Lily. You’d be surprised. Hot or frigid, it don’t make no difference!’
Harold speculates with dead indifference, ‘To which category I wonder, does our Irene belong?’
Bruce says you are a dark horse, no-one has found out yet, unless it’s …
Just then her aunt appears with another dish of snags to appease her men.
‘Oh Ireen’s the passionate type like me. Aren’t you, darl?’ Ally gushes.
Everybody joins in the laugh then the boys settle down to wrapping their teeth round food, their lips soon as greasy as sausage skins, bloodied with tomato sauce.
But whose face would Bruce consider you might be wearing in the ‘locket’?
Bruce and Keith are growing at the same rate as Gilbert Horsfall—or as Gil was when you last saw him. The Lockhart brothers are growing hairier every day. If ever at table Bruce lays his arm alongside yours it prickles like horsehair in some old burst mattress. On these occasions his breathing grows more noticeable. He says he’ll take you for a drive riding pillion when he gets that motorbike—‘if you’re not afraid.’ You aren’t because it’s likely to be some way off. He is saving money from the jobs he does at week-ends and in the holidays when the climate doesn’t damp his enthusiasm. Yes I think I’m safe from Bruce (or ‘Bruise’ as they pronounce it.)
It is Bruce who is bringing you this letter on the last Tuesday before term starts at ‘Ambleside’. Know it as Tuesday. You will always remember it as Tuesday because this is the first letter you ever received with an Australian stamp on it, and Ally has finally bought you the uniform for the next terrifying phase of life in an Australian school.
The letter itself is frightening enough—‘Bruise’ has been up to the box. He advances into the back yard holding the envelope by a corner. You turn to face him.
‘A formal letter for Miss Irene Sklavos.’
He minces towards me. His attempt at a refined accent, and the hairy wrist with its metal watchband as he jiggles the letter under my nose is meant to make the situation humiliating. The key on its chain lies cold between your painful breasts. Yes, you are humiliated.
If he leaves you to the letter it doesn’t mean he isn’t watching from inside the house. They are all watching, Alison and Harold for once united in boring into the contents of the envelope.
Kyrie eleison amongst the fretted cabbage leaves and silver snail tracks. Dragging at the corner of the envelope you make this prayer of joy and fear, crumbling into the Greek reffo you will always be.
The last must be first
Just a line from your fellow reffo
Gil
Doxa to Theo for these palpitations, this elevation, under the empty clothesline tingling with its droplets of moisture.
Dear Eirene (dear Gil)
I wonder how you are getting on since I left Neutral Bay. Isn’t that Neutral the biggest laugh in war or peace? I would love to see you but our ways lie apart in life and schools. I am starting term at this Churchy Grammar School for boys, and you I hear are bound for ‘Ambleside’ and Miss Hammersley. I can only say good luck to us, mate.
I often think about us Reen—and the tree-house, the bloody cubby—you sitting on the upright Arnotts biscuit tin like it was your inherited throne. Perhaps it was. From all this we can only meet again.
Sorry my typing isn’t all it ought to be. Fiona is letting me use her machine—so as Lockharts won’t swoop in and recognise my writing. Fiona (Cutlack) is Mrs Stally’s niece who lives here too. Vaucluse isn’t all that bad—if not our sort of country Reen. What is, I’d like to know, outside the big fig tree in Cameron Street. Old Stally is the silliest bugger you ever had to put up with. You wonder anyone’s accounts come right. Mrs S. is an invalid. Sundays we eat lunch at the Royal Sydney Golf Club. A lot of congealed custard and Stallybrasses galore. Fiona is the best of them. She’s learning touchtyping, so as she can take a job till she marries—if the war doesn’t last forever, if it does she’ll go into the WRANS, she reckons the hats will suit her best.
Oh Jesus, the fucking war. Perhaps I should skip the school bit and join up. My dad ought to approve, if they ever approve of anything. Get killed like poor old Nigel. Don’t think anything will kill Horsfall or if it does I’ll come back to haunt the places we’ve been together.
Fiona says that most of what I say is pure bullsh. Hope you don’t think the same, Reen, of what I sincerely feel
This FIONA is probably right …
Just a line from your fellow reffo
Gil
What to do with the letter? Stick it down your front with the key, if they won’t hear the key beating against the envelope, if their long distance eyes haven’t already read the message?
By the time you go in they have decided on their line of attack. Bruce gazing at the fly-specks on the ceiling, Keith his lids lowered, thick lips still greasy from breakfast trembling with amusement and the comb-and-paper tune he is humming. Ally has chosen a fit of busyness, scraping plates and jostling cups on saucers, to disguise her thoughts and intentions.
Only Harold expresses his disapproval in words. ‘Hope it was good news, Irene. Or perhaps it was only a business letter.’
The secret we share gives his interest a sting which the others cannot feel.
‘No. It’s a letter from a friend.’ My reply as flat as his enquiry.
‘Glad you have friends around.’ His low voice vibrates in a way which might reach deep inside someone who meets him for the first time at the Quay or on the ferry.
The ears of the others are pricking of course. To know who Reen’s friend could possibly be. Your nostrils are pinched as you enjoy a twinge of evil in yourself. You could have stuck a pin in any of them as Viva stuck the pin in your arm that first day at school and seemed to grow hypnotised by the pinprick of blood.
Unable to solve a mystery, they go their different ways, and you are left with the ballooning melancholy which comes with the prospect of this new important school. Even the ‘Ambleside’ uniform has a smell of importance which warns off a black reffo Greek.
Would like to have another read of the letter, only Alison Lockhart reappears. Her face tells that she would like to have an intimate talk now that you are alone in the house. She accepts you as a woman, no longer the unwanted child-niece, because she wants to unload some of her own unhappiness.
‘You will always be frank with me, dear—I hope —how can we trust each other if you aren’t?’
Poor old Alison makes you feel happy by comparison—not to say dishonest. Has she guessed perhaps, and only wants it confirmed. She ought to know. It takes a very short time to find out all there is to know about Harold. If you could tell her that you are her ally, that Gil is your friend, as pure a secret as Harold is a dirty one. But secrets, whether pure or dirty, are for so
me people difficult to share.
Her aunt is off at a tangent. ‘What I am afraid of,’ she tears out a tissue, a box of which she keeps handy in every room, ‘is that when you go to this school—up the line—other girls—their parents—will take you up, and from beginning to accept you as my own daughter, I shall—well, I shall never see you.’
It could be genuine, except that the sniffles and the Kleenex seemed to create a drama, an incestuous one at that, if Ally is my mother and Harold my would-be seducer.
You are trying not to laugh.
‘What is it?’
‘I was thinking of the Greek Tragedies.’
‘I can’t see any connection,’ she says rolling the Kleenex into a ball, and throwing it in the waste paper basket. ‘This is Australia and although you are a Greek, we thought—wrong or right—you had started seeing yourself as an Australian.’
It is too much.
‘I don’t know what I am. I don’t want anyone to—take me up. I only want to be left alone—to be myself—when I find out what that is.’
Ally is embarrassed by turning on emotion in somebody else. But she asked for it.
‘How you exaggerate, Ireen. I do hope you won’t blow your top like this at “Ambleside”, and disgrace us all.’
Embarrassment gets rid of Alison. So at least you are alone, to think your own thoughts, if not to discover what you are.
The aunt can be heard driving off safe in her scungy old car, with its cigarettes and box of travelling tissues.
* * *
Alison had driven you up to the interview with Miss Hammersley. If you were accepted the ‘principal’ (Alison’s unexpected word) had made it clear she was doing it as a favour and because you were an ‘interesting proposition’. The waiting list for ‘Ambleside’ was long; parents of the best professional and grazier families put their girls down years ahead.
The Hanging Garden Page 12